Chapter 9

On the following Saturday, having seen Paul off on his fishing trip with Warren, his sons, and Vince Allegretti early the morning before, Nadine wondered how she would endure another empty, excuseless day without Monty. Miraculously, Sherry had decided to spend Friday evening at home. They had baked a cake, invited Leila to share it, and the three of them had watched television, Nadine trembling inside with frustration. Even a phone call to Monty had been unfeasible ... and when was Paul likely to go away for three consecutive days again?

But late Saturday morning, Sherry galloped into her bedroom and made a dramatic announcement. "I saw him!"

"Saw whom?"

"George Weidberger! Fran and I drove past Ryners' house a while ago. He was on the lawn with Mrs. Ryner. Oh, man!"

"That much reaction ... from a quick view?"

"And he does have a Corvette. White. He was smoking a pipe, real mature, and yeeks ... is he a doll!"

"Didn't you stop and say hello? When you drove by Ryners'?"

"In my filthy tennis shorts? With this hair?" Nadine appreciated the reasoning.

"But wait'll I tell you! Frannie had to go buy buns a while ago ... for the hamburgers tonight. And who do we meet in the bakery! Mrs. Ryner. You know what she had on? Pink capris. And rhinestone earrings."

"Baby, those weren't rhinestones."

"I shouldn't be chopping her, though. You know what she said? She's going to bring George over to meet me! She said it right in front of Frannie. I wonder what that did for her chromosomes? But the deal is ... the girls are having this pajama party at Frannie's tonight...."

"All night?"

"Well, don't sweat it, Mother ... it's only on Hill Drive ... next door to the Allegrettis'."

Nadine smiled indulgently. "I suppose it'll be all right."

"But what if Mrs. Ryner brings George over tonight?"

"You wouldn't want to be sitting around on a Saturday night waiting for him?"

Sherry pondered for a moment. "Oh, man ... I didn't think of that. You could tell him I had a date. You wouldn't be fibbing. Just don't say what kind of date. Maybe it's a good thing I won't be home tonight. Hey, is it all right if I split over to Frannie's now?" Sherry hesitated. "I hate to leave you alone...."

"I was thinking about ... going to an auction downtown. I might stay down and see a movie."

"Hey, swingin'! Take Leila."

"That's a thought."

Sherry left the house moments afterward with Nadine's blessing.

Every wall in the house crackled. There was a phone call to make. A shower and a final decision, not only on the dress but everything that would be worn beneath it.

Under the shower, Nadine, who was not given to bathroom vocalizing, sang, "Oh, What a beautiful Morning...!"

She was still humming the tune as she drove north on Rush Street shortly after noon.

A starkly black and white mural, composed of barely identifiable nude abstractions, covered three walls of Monty Carrell's bedroom.

There was a bleached mahogany chest of drawers against one wall, a matching stereo cabinet against another. It was only four in the afternoon, but an enormous gold and white sculptured lamp was lighted, casting faint light and oblique shadows over the parade of angled nudes. Heavy coral-colored draperies had been drawn across the room's solitary window, and Hoist's The Planets, tuned low, added to the other-world atmosphere.

They rested on a king-sized, legless bed, the vivid coral, raw silk spread no longer drawn tightly over its low-slung contours.

Monty's fingers delineated the tilt of Nadine's left breast lanquidly. "You know what I like best about you?"

"Nope."

"You dig sex. The way I do."

Sleek, complacent animal contentment oozed through her veins. "If I wasn't so comfortable, darling, I'd get up and curtsy."

"Are you lunchish?"

"Would we have to dress?"

"No."

"Maybe in a little while. I'm not really hungry."

Monty sidled over to etch her body with a slow, provocative trail of kisses. "I am."

They both laughed, embracing delightedly, lolling luxuriously over the unnecessarily broad expanse beneath them. Slow, heady physical wine. Monty was only a commercial hack at his easel, but here he was an artist. Here he gave himself painstakingly, reverently, to the world's most time-mellowed art.

None of Vince's crudeness, none of Warren's self-castigations. Soul music, counterpoint for the rising acceleration of her pulse. "I'd like to curl myself into a tiny atom and live inside you." Demonstrating the idea in the limited manner possible to him....

"Monty, it's too soon...!"

Smiling up at her from the center of the bed; "I'm a little boy turned loose in a candy shop."

"Stop playing down your checkered past! This isn't new to you." Inviting the inevitable compliment ... knowing the past few hours would go down in any man's book as memorable.

He became passionately serious, toying with her body while he spoke, as though a profound mystery had been revealed to him for the first time. "But you are new. New and exhilarating and wonderful." Somewhat wistfully, somberly, he said, "Do you know what it means to starve in the midst of plenty? You can't visualize me as someone ... lonely, can you?" She was touched. Genuinely touched. "You, Monty?"

"Oh, I'll admit I've enjoyed the butterfly-netting process. Stick a pin through the thorax of enough lepidopterae, though, and the hobby starts becoming a chore." To emphasize his need for Nadine, he buried his face against her thigh. "I'd begun to doubt there was anyone capable of accepting me completely. All of me, lover ... the way I want possession of your mind, your body, your soul...."

Nadine had closed her eyes, wanting nothing to distract her from this blissful transport. The distraction that came assaulted her ears. In the adjoining studio-living room, the phone began to ring.

If Monty heard the sound over the "Mars" movement of the planetary suite, he refused to let it dissuade him from his purpose. When the ringing became an annoyance, Nadine said, "Aren't you going to answer that?"

"It's Ann Helsley. One of the butterflies. She's convinced I've only tired of her because she's putting on weight and I can't use her as a model. How would I explain to her that I've found a key to my existence?"

Nadine was only slightly jarred by the lines ... jarred because she had used words to the same effect with others. Yet she had never duplicated Monty's fevered intonation, and she needed no instructions from Nadine-the-director to breathe unevenly, to half-close her eyes, to part her lips in submissive passion.

The rhythmic bell-staccato of the telephone finally ended.

Monty sighed his relief, then plunged into a championship bout of the flesh that left Nadine helpless. Clasp of surprisingly muscular arms; hands appreciative of every gentle curve of her body, respectors of no secrets.

Raging eroticism, then the tender agony of worshipful love! Oh, glorious tour de force of intricately balanced ecstasies! Why had she derided sex as the least important of her needs from other men? Yet how obvious the answer to that question! She was in love, she was in love ... said it before, believed it before, but all the others scattered now before the formidable avalanche of Monty's possession. Now it was true!

Sometime during the evening, they combined lunch and dinner, Monty producing a questionable assortment of delicacies ... pate de foie gras, soup terrapin with sherry, truffles, tongue, an endive salad plus an undecipherably exotic dressing with anchovy overtones. Brandied cherries followed their coffee. He played Nadine's game all the way.

Some of this fare was shared with an unbearably particular Siamese cat. Nadine had missed meeting her on the first trip, and "Certainly," (who had earned her name by a semiannual inability to say "No" to Gold Coast tomcats)...."Certainly" had been locked out of the bedroom earlier to insure privacy.

"She goes wherever I go," Monty said, trying to interest the Siamese in a strip of anchovy. "Do you ... go often?"

"I get bored. I've been seriously thinking of Paris again. New York for a month or two. Then a wire to my old concierge in the Rue de Tournon."

Strangely practical for a moment, Nadine asked. "Does Paul know you don't intend to stay?"

"Oh, I'll have him piled up with calendar girls for a year ahead. He won't be left high and dry."

"Will anyone?" Nadine asked pointedly.

Monty dropped the Siamese to the floor. He came over to the red couch to kneel at Nadine's feet, taking hold of her hands and fixing her with a devastatingly earnest gaze. "How I wish you could come, too!"

"Paris?"

"It was built for us, Nadine! Have you ever been?"

"No. No, I haven't actually gone much further than Lake Ste. Germaine."

"I want you to be with me."

"I couldn't begin to...."

"Not the tourists' Paris." (Nadine thought of the Ryners and was positive there must be a Paris exclusively meant for her.) "None of your Eiffel Tower ogling, not even the highly touted strolls down the Champs Elysees. Our Paris, Nadine. How I wish you were free!"

Nadine pictured herself in a Parisian street cafe, eyes turned in her direction, Monty following worshipfully behind. Pernod, passion, Paris! She stroked Monty's silvery hair and bathed in the exquisite fantasy.

Paul was the kindest, the most understanding, most wonderful man in the world. And Sherry was a delightful girl. But what if fate threw the inevitable into your face? What if you shared another love with someone who would always be lonely and incomplete without you? Someone you loved? A romantic garret, with a great, unrecognized artist laying his heart at your feet throughout the intoxicating Parisian....

The stereo speakers poured out Tschaikovsky's Fifth and the telephone began to ring once more.

Monty groaned. "Some women live on a cloud. Do you have the same problem, lover? Men who don't know enough to bow out gracefully when it's over?"

Nadine nodded. "Why don't you talk to the poor girl? I feel terribly sorry for her."

Monty raised his brows as though that concept was entirely new to him. "Why? She had two of the best months of my life."

Tschaikovsky filled the room with a stirring crescendo. After a while the telephone was silent again, and at nine o'clock, when they ran out of conversation, they went to bed. At two or three or four, they went to sleep.

It was only part of the fabric of dreams, but it seemed to Nadine that the telephone rang intermittently throughout the night.