Whispers of the Flesh (15 page)

Isabel said, “A dinner party at a friend’s house, right, Dad?”

He nodded, his fingertips absently rubbing the duct-taped spine of the book still sitting like some mangy but beloved old pet on his lap. “The Turners.”

“Dad was in the RAF,” Isabel said, “a flight lieutenant.”

“Yeah?” Jason sat up straighter, suddenly interested. “Did you fly fighter jets?”

“Fighter-bombers.” Emmett coughed sharply. “Not that they did much fighting
or
bombing—which I suppose is a good thing.”

“Back in the seventies, he was teaching flight school at the Brize Norton RAF base, not far from London,” Isabel said. “Which was what he was doing when he met Mom, who had long red hair and wore love beads and was this total hippie goddess, and here he’s Mr. Uptight, Super-straight Spit-and-polish—”

“
Lieutenant
Uptight, Super-straight Spit-and-polish,” he corrected with mock umbrage.

“Mom was studying at the Wimbledon College of Art,” Isabel said as she plucked a cucumber sandwich from the tea tray. “Dad went totally ga-ga over her, which I still don’t quite get, but she didn’t seem to know he was alive, so he organized this hippie love-in here at Grotte Cachée.”

Karen said, “You’re joking.”

“She isn’t joking,” Emmett said hoarsely, “but neither is she correct. It was not a ‘love-in,’ it was a weekend house party, which was not even, strictly speak—” He pressed his handkerchief over his mouth as he coughed, his whole body shaking.

Grace said,“Mr. Archer, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to—”

“Which was not,” Emmett continued, “strictly speaking, even my idea. My father, who was
administrateur
at the time, was setting out on holiday with my mother—three weeks in Australia and New Zealand. Since I had leave coming, he asked me to stay at the château and be of whatever assistance I could to Seigneur des Ombres.”

“Adrien’s father,” Isabel clarified. “Julien Morel.”

“He told me I should feel free to invite a guest or two for a few days,” said Emmett. “So I asked Hitch and Maddy—two Yanks who had never been to France. And I thought Hitch could use a bit of R and R. Maddy asked if she could bring a couple of friends along. Unfortunately, I said yes.”

“You two knew each other then?” asked Grace, looking from Emmett to Hitch.

Emmett nodded as he coughed into his handkerchief, so Isabel answered for him. “Hitch was a fighter pilot, too, and a guest flying instructor at Brize Norton when Dad was teaching there. Before that, he’d spent two years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.”

“Oh. Wow.” Grace regarded Hitch with interest, and maybe a smidge of awe. “But wait. I thought the POWs weren’t released till the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam in ’seventy-three, so how could you have been in London in ’seventy-two?”

“Time off for good behavior,” Hitch drawled into his teacup.

The dismissive quip didn’t surprise Isabel in the least. One of the reasons Hitch and her father had always gotten along so well was that they both tended to hold their cards close to the vest.

“The Geneva Convention required the North Vietnamese to release their seriously ill and injured prisoners,” Karen explained, “so in ’sixty-nine, they finally caved to international pressure and freed some of the men they’d starved and tortured half to death. Hitch was one of them. He wasn’t ready to return to his old life in the States, though, so Uncle Sam lent him to the Brits for a couple of years.”

“I always wondered about that,” said Jason as he snagged three butter cookies off the tray. “I mean, if I’d been through that kind of hell, all I’d want to do is go home and chill.”

It was something Isabel had always wondered about, too. She’d asked her father about it when she was nine or ten, and he’d replied curtly that it was none of her affair.

Karen and Hitch exchanged a glance, she looking a bit sheepish for having broached the subject. The moment dragged on about a second and a half too long, so Isabel said, “The POWs who were released weren’t allowed to talk about their treatment till the rest of them were home, which had to put a lot of pressure on them when they were with their friends and family.”

Which was true enough, though unlikely to be the reason for Hitch’s self-imposed exile after his repatriation.

Karen smiled at Isabel the way you smile at someone when what you really want to do is wink.

When Jason, ruminating on this as he chewed and swallowed, opened his mouth to pursue the subject, Isabel decided to yank the conversation back to its original path. “The reason Dad’s always regretted letting my mom bring along a couple of friends is that it wasn’t just a couple, it was, like twenty or thirty. Plus Dad and Hitch. It was like
Dazed and Confused
meets
Full Metal Jacket.
”

“There were fifteen at the most,” Emmett said. “But it seemed like fifty.”

“The owner of the place,” Jason said, “Julien Morel, he didn’t have a problem with all these strangers descending on his home?”

“No, he was used to that sort of thing,” Emmett said. “I did apologize to him for the lack of advance warning. He was very gracious, said they seemed like just the type to provide some much-needed diversion for the Follets.”

“Who were the Follets?” Karen asked.

Isabel stilled with another cucumber sandwich halfway to her mouth. Her father winced. He wouldn’t have mentioned the Follets but for his bleariness of late; he’d never been the careless sort.

Isabel said, “The Follets were staying here.” She didn’t volunteer that they had, in fact, been staying here for thousands of years.

Emmett said, “It was a long and . . . interesting weekend.”

“To say the least,” Hitch said quietly.

Two

July 1972

I
SMELLED IT AS I climbed the southwest tower to Inigo’s apartment, that miasma of weed and incense that had been hovering around this place like a psychotropic fog for the past couple of days. The thump-thump-thump from his celebrated and much-envied quadraphonic stereo system reverberated in the winding stone stairwell, Mick Jagger howling about being on a losing streak, but he tries, and he tries, and he tries, and he tries . . .

Yeah, buddy. Right there with you.

The first thing I noticed through the open door on the second-floor landing was Inigo sitting on the electric orange shag carpet at the far end of the room with a topless chick whose abundant breasts he was painting in psychedelic swirls of red, yellow, and green. All around him were heaped pillows and bean bag chairs draped with long-haired bodies decked out in beads and scarves, tie-dye, flowing skirts, halter tops, dashikis, and of course the ubiquitous bell-bottomed jeans, the wider and more threadbare, the better.

“Hitch! My man!” Inigo yelled over the music. With his long mane of wild black curls, his vintage top hat, pink-tinted granny glasses, multipatched hip-hugger jeans, and striped vest—sans shirt—he looked like he could have stepped off the cover of
Sgt. Pepper’s
.

Some of the others greeted me with smiles and waves. One guy proffered a hash pipe, which I declined as always. In the taxonomy of hippies, these were the Blissed-Out Flower Child variety, as opposed to, at the other extreme, their Molotov-hurling Pseudo-Revolutionary second cousins. As such, they’d been thankfully accepting, or at least tolerant, of Emmett and me despite the uniforms hanging in our closets at home. Most of them, that is. There were a handful who gave us the hairy eyeball, like we were baby-killing storm troopers instead of lieutenants in our nations’ respective Air Forces, but I’d gotten used to that since returning from my little vacation in the exotic Hanoi Hilton; it didn’t really faze me anymore.

“About time you checked out my pad,” Inigo said as he raised his omnipresent tequila bottle to his mouth; most everybody else looked to be drinking beer, from all the bottles scattered around. “What do you think?”

“Cool place,” I said, though what I really thought was that my eyeballs just might short out from visual overload.

Bolts of afternoon sunlight glittered in the musty haze, illuminating stone walls and a raftered ceiling almost completely wallpapered in posters, most of them advertising rock concerts or denouncing the war. In each corner of the room loomed a fridge-size speaker draped in batik-printed Indian throws and swaths of fishnet. Bathing the room in a cool, otherworldly radiance was the ambient light from an immense built-in aquarium, the biggest I’d ever seen. Must have held three hundred gallons, easy.

Some of the room’s occupants were just staring, transfixed, at the particolored fish dancing and flirting in the tank. Two guys were sucking from a gurgling hookah. There were couples making out, one of them basically dry-humping in rhythm with the music:
I can’t get no, oh no no no . . .
Thing was, they could have had privacy if they’d wanted; it was a big fucking castle. Not exactly a shy bunch.

Through a beaded curtain I saw a little alcove furnished with a couch on which a couple lay facedown, the guy on top, both of them with their jeans pushed down around their thighs. I recognized the guy. It was an Irishman named John Fitzgerald Kennedy—a kick-ass name, but they all called him Val because of his uncanny resemblance to the tall, inky-haired, angelically handsome Prince Valiant of comic strip fame. The girl beneath him clutched the couch cushion as he pushed hard and slow, pushing, pushing . . .

He’s fucking her in the ass,
I thought. But then she turned her head, and I saw it wasn’t a girl at all.

Jesus Christ.
I turned away with a sense of dull shock. Two guys making it—that was one thing I never thought I’d see with my own eyes.

In the middle of the room, a petite blonde with a daisy painted on one cheek and a peace symbol on the other lay faceup on a long coffee table, taking her turn having her chakras healed by their resident snake-oil salesman, who also happened to be the Grand Vizier of the Hairy Eyeball Fraternity.

“Starbuck,” as he’d dubbed himself, was a Brit with long, well-brushed golden hair, a dark beard, and phosphor blue eyes. In his white Indian shirt, he looked like Presbyterian Jesus.

My ears tuned out the music to hear what he was telling the girl as he rested one hand on the crotch of her super-short denim cutoffs, the other on top of her head. “The second chakra is called the Svadhishthana, and yours is badly blocked—I can tell by the imperfections in its aura.”

He moved the hand he was copping a feel with in a slow caress, his eyes closed, his expression one of deep concentration. Like all the other girls here, the little blonde was manifestly, and exquisitely, braless; the best fashion trend of my lifetime. Her peasant blouse was so sheer that I could make out not just the contours of her breasts, but her nipples, rose-petal pink. They grew erect as the chakra-fondling Starbuck did his thing. Damn hard to keep from gaping.

Damn
hard.

Starbuck said, “It’s critical that something be done about this, Willow. This is the chakra that governs your inner child, your creativity . . . your sexuality. I need to unblock it so that it can take its place as part of the spiritual whole made up of your past and present incarnations . . .”

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one whose bullshit alarm was going off, because the gorgeous redhead sitting on the floor nearby gave him a dubious glance—ironic, inasmuch as she was in the process of interpreting a crosslike arrangement of Tarot cards laid out in front of her.

Madeleine Lamb was her name, and she was actually the reason for this weekend of orgiastic hippie revelry.

Emmett Archer, my best friend and the custodian of my sanity, had invited Madeleine and me to Grotte Cachée, ostensibly because he found it bizarre and unacceptable that two Americans who’d spent the past couple of years in London should have never crossed the Channel. In fact, the real reason he asked me was that I was perennially wound up and he thought I could use four days of chilling out in a remote French château. The reason he invited Madeleine was because he’d fallen hard for her during a dinner party in London a couple of weeks ago, and wanted an excuse to spend some time with her.

“You know Botticelli’s
Venus?” Emmett had asked me on the way here.

“You mean Venus on the Half Shell?”
I said.

“She looks just like that, long, rippling red hair, the same kind of face, just ethereally beautiful. But her body is different, tall and lithe, like Jean Shrimpton. You’ll see when you meet her. And she’s a terrific artist, smart, funny . . . She’s just amazing. I’ve never met a girl like her.
”

In the two-plus years I’d been palling around with Emmett—in between training jet jockeys for the RAF—I’d never seen him lose it like that over a girl, especially not a hip-pie artist type. Handsome and dryly charming, he dated—and scored—on a regular basis, although unlike some guys, he never volunteered the details. But while he’d liked all those women, and regarded a few of them as “choice birds,” he’d never gotten ga-ga over anyone—until now.

The joke was on him, though, because the girl of his dreams had brought along this freak show entourage, half of them fellow art students and the other half old friends of hers from New York who were spending their summer vacations crashing in her London flat. They called themselves the Merry Gangsters, like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, only a little less witty and a lot less original. The bad news for Emmett had come when Madeleine introduced one of the art students as her “old man.”

Starbuck.

“This is The Chariot.” Madeleine turned the card so it could be seen by the friend she was doing the reading for, a black chick with luscious curves, a super-sweet baby face, and a colossal Afro, one of the Americans.

“What’s it supposed to signify?” asked the guy sitting with them, a Dutch art student named Pieter who looked a hell of a lot like Robert Redford, only with shaggy hair and wire-rimmed glasses.

Pieter was Madeleine’s Backup Boyfriend. You know, the guy who hangs around a chick who’s already taken, ready to move in if and when she goes back on the market. I liked him. He was smart and friendly, and he wasn’t being a pain in the ass with Madeleine, just staying close, politely waiting his turn.

“It’s a warlike card, or at least that’s the way it feels to me right now,” Madeleine said as she held it between her palms. “I see someone taking up the role of the warrior. I think someone close to you may have joined the Army. Your . . . brother? Do you have a brother, Diane?”

Diane gaped at her. “Ron. He . . . he just enlisted Thursday. He called to tell me, and I chewed him a new one, ’cause they’re just gonna send him to ’Nam. I haven’t told anyone. How could you know that?”

Madeleine smiled enigmatically as she shrugged her delicate shoulders.

“Is he gonna be okay?” Diane asked.

Madeleine held her friend’s gaze for a long moment, her expression fading to neutral. She carefully replaced the card in its spot in the arrangement, saying “It’s in the hands of fate” without looking up.

I needed to pay rent on the pot of coffee I’d emptied that morning, so I asked someone where the head was, and he pointed to a spiral staircase leading up. Climbing it, I found myself in a kind of anteroom with a big, lavish bathroom off to one side. Straight ahead was an arched doorway through which I could see a naked girl reclining against a stack of pillows on a king-sized bed. Four fully dressed people were painting her body by the sunlight streaming in through the windows, augmented by scores and scores of candles lining every surface in the room.

The human canvas was Lili, one of the four who lived in this castle-turned-carnival, and one of the two men sitting across from each other painting her upper body was Elic, whom I took to be her boyfriend. Lili was beautiful, sensual, a fox of the highest magnitude. If she was my girl, no way in hell would I let another guy even shake her hand, much less stroke a paintbrush over her naked breasts. Elic had to be out of his fucking mind.

The other guy, holding a big wooden palette laid out with blobs and smears of paint, his paint-spattered jeans held up with red suspenders, was one of the art students, Doobie. His girlfriend, Anna, a delicate, black-haired, black-garbed little thing who danced with the Royal Ballet, was on the other side next to Elic, working on Lili’s abdomen. A blond, tanned, well-stacked Amazon named Josepha, or Jo for short—also an art student, judging from the snug Wimbledon College T-shirt she wore with her Army fatigue pants—did the same from the opposite side.

Jo must have seen me, because she caught my eye and smiled. She opened her mouth, but I ducked into the john before she could say anything.

I took my leak and was heading for the stairwell when Elic called out over the music thudding up from downstairs, “Hitch!”

I sighed as I turned around to stand in the doorway. “Hey, man.”

“The girls are wondering if you’d like to join in. Jo says you look like the artistic type.”

“Not even a little bit,” I said, shoving my hands in my front jeans pockets.

Lili raised herself up on her elbows to look at me. “Come on, Hitch. We can use the help, and you don’t have to be Leonardo. Doobie already sketched out the design, so it’ll be like coloring in a coloring book.”

It was all I could do to maintain eye contact and not just stare at those luscious breasts, between which had been painted a black band about two inches wide. “Um . . .”

Giving me one of her breath-stealing smiles, she said, “Please?”

Damn, she was hard to resist.
What the hell,
I thought. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Sure.”

As I entered the room, I saw that Lili was lying not directly on the tie-dyed bedspread, but on a paint-stained canvas drop cloth. Between her parted legs sat an open, battered toolbox with doobie Magic Markered on the outside that held jars of brushes in water, mangled tubes of acrylic paint, and various other art supplies.

Lili wasn’t being painted with the usual random designs I’d been seeing on people’s faces and bodies that weekend, but rather with the image of a guitar, a detailed outline of which had, indeed, been painted onto her in thin sepia brushstrokes, and was now about halfway filled in with color. The black band between her breasts, which I could now see had frets and strings painted on it, was the guitar’s neck, ending just under her chin. The hourglass shape of the soundboard, rimmed in a narrow checkered pattern, had been positioned to echo Lili’s womanly contours, the top edge bisecting her breasts just above the nipples. It was obviously intended to give the effect, when painted in, of a low-cut strapless bodice. The guitar dipped in at her narrow waist, then flared out again with her hips so that the bottom cut across her upper thighs. The sound hole encircling her navel was ringed in the same pattern as the guitar itself and decorated inside with an astonishingly intricate, lacy design. The outline of the bridge, positioned across the upper fringe of her pubic hair, was unusually wide, with a flowery curlicue at either end spiraling up over her hip bones.

“What do you think?” Doobie asked in a stoned-out, lord-of-the-manner drawl. “I’m gonna photograph her for my master’s project, which is about using human beings as canvases to make living art.”

“Pretty fucking heavy, no?” Jo said.

I agreed that it was fucking heavy. “Shouldn’t you be painting it by yourself if it’s your project?” I asked Doobie.

“Hey, man, even Picasso has assistants.”

Yeah, ’cause he’s pushing a hundred,
I thought, but I just said, “That’s a cool-looking guitar.”

“It’s a baroque guitar,” said Jo as she painted an impressively realistic golden-brown wood grain over Lili’s stomach. Her British-inflected English bore just the faintest Germanic undertone. “That one.” She nodded toward an instrument propped on a stand in the corner of the stone-walled room. It was the oddest guitar I’d ever seen, narrow, ornately carved, and inlaid precisely like the one being painted on Lili.