Her apartment was big. She bustled about, turning on strategic lighting, tossing her cape aside. Modern paintings, lighted by spots, made big bright explosions on the walls. A complex wire sculpture on a low pedestal was lighted in such a way it threw a huge mysterious shadow form on a far wall.
“In spite of all the Borlikas,” she said, “my personal tastes are contemporary. I happen to feel that…” The phone started ringing. She excused herself, started toward it, then went into the bedroom and closed the door. The phone stopped. She came back out a few moments later, brisk and chatty.
She opened a small lacquered bar and scurried off to the kitchen to get cubes. I made us two tall highballs. She took me on a circular tour of inspection of the paintings and sculpture, lecturing like a museum guide.
Then she said, “I do have one little collection of eighteenth century art. Come along.” With a brassy and forlorn confidence she marched me into her bedroom. It was more persuasively feminine than I would have guessed, canopied bed, pastel ruffles and furry rugs. She turned on a display light which illuminated a dark blue panel in the bedroom wall. In random arrangement against the panel were a dozen or so delicate little paintings, most of them round, a few of them oval, all framed in narrow gold, all a little smaller than saucers.
“French,” she said. “Metallic paints on tortoise shell. It was a precious little fad for a time. They are quite rare and valuable.”
“Very nice,” I said.
“Look at them closely, dear,” she said, with a mocking smile.
I did so, and suddenly realized that they were not what they appeared to be, not innocent little scenes of life in the king’s court. They were not pornographic. They were merely exquisitely, decadently sensual.
“I’ll be damned!” I said, and she gave a husky laugh of delight.
She moved closer and pointed to one. “This is my favorite. Will you just look at the fatuous expression on that sly devil’s face.”
“And she looks so completely innocent.”
“Of course,” she said. Her smile faded as she looked at me. She turned and with exaggerated care placed her empty glass on a small ornate table with a white marble top. It made a small audible click as she set it down. She turned back with her eyes almost closed and groped her way into my arms, whispering, in a private argument with herself, “I’m not like this. I’m really not like this.”
The physical act, when undertaken for any motive other than love and need, is a fragmenting experience. The spirit wanders. There is a mild feeling of distaste for one’s self. She was certainly sufficiently attractive, mature, totally eager, but we were still strangers. She wanted to use me as a weapon against her own lonely demons. I wanted information from her. We were more adversaries than lovers. The comments of old Samuel Johnson about the pursuit of women kept drifting into my mind. The expense is damnable, the position ridiculous, the pleasure fleeting.
But it went very well for her there in the faint night light under the yellow ruffles of the canopy, very well on a physical basis, which is, perhaps, the least important part, sufficiently well to induce her, in the post-tempest euphoria, to give myriad little kitteny affections, a purring gratitude.
“This is the last thing I expected to happen,” she said, with a luxurious stretching. “You’re very sweet.”
“Sure.”
She took my wrist, guided my cigarette to her lips. When she exhaled she said, “Did you expect it to happen?”
“Let’s put it this way. I hoped it would. Life is full of coincidences, Betty. Some of them are nasty. Some of them are fine. I guess they’re supposed to balance out sometime. I suppose, in a sense, that guy brought us together.”
“Who, darling?”
“The guy who collected the little gold people.”
“Oh,” she said in a sleepy voice. “Carlos Menterez y Cruzada.”
“Who’s he?”
I made it a bored question, as indifferent as her response had been.
“Sort of a bastard, dear. A Cuban bastard. Very close to Batista. A collector. Those five you picked out, he bought them from us.” She yawned, snuggled more comfortably against me and gave a little snorting sound of derision and said, “He collected me, too. In a sort of offhand way. I guess women were a lot more abundant than gold for Senor Menterez. I hated him a while. I don’t any more.”
“How did it happen?”
“Because I was a stupid young girl and he was a very knowing man. It was when I was working at the place, before I married Tony. We had two items he was interested in. I was on salary and two percent commission. He said he couldn’t make up his mind. He had a suite at the Waldorf. He called up just before we closed and asked me to bring the photographs over. Drinks and dinner in the suite, of course. He was very charming, very amusing. He didn’t make the mistake of begging or insisting or arguing. He just seemed to assume that I was going to go to bed with him, and that I wouldn’t have come to the suite if I wasn’t willing, and it all seemed to be so settled in advance, I just didn’t know how to handle it. I couldn’t seem to find the right moment to set my heels and pretty soon, there I was in bed, scared, confused and apologetic. A knowing man can manage it that way with a green girl.”
“How old was he then?”
“Mmm. Eight years ago. Early forties. Twenty years older than I was.”
“Nice-looking man?”
“No. Not very tall. Sort of portly, even. Thin little mustache and going bald. Very nice yes. Long lashes. Beautiful suits and shirts, and beautiful grooming. Manicures and facials and cologne and massages. A car and driver picked me up after work the next day too. He was in New York on business with several other Cuban businessmen, but he had the suite to himself. He bought me an absolutely beautiful gown. He wanted me to go back to Havana with him. He said he could set me up with a little shop of my own there. He had me in such a confused daze, I almost made that much of a fool of myself. I didn’t even really like him. I couldn’t understand why I kept doing exactly as he asked me to do. He didn’t seem… very intense about me. Just sort of jocular and fond, like people are toward dogs.”
“Was he married?”
“Yes. After he left it took me about two weeks to come out of the fog. You know, I had always wondered how reasonably attractive girls ever got themselves into entanglements like that with older married men. I just had a kind of anxious, earnest desire to please him. I didn’t want him to be disappointed in me in any way. A vassal state. Then I woke up and knew it had been a very dirty business.”
“What kind of business was he in in Cuba?”
She yawned. “I don’t know. Lots of things. After the roof fell in on all those people down there, I used to wonder what happened to the Menterez collection. I suppose he got out with it. And whatever else he could carry. I wondered if we would ever hear. Or if he would show up to peddle it all back to us. But somebody got it away from him, and you got it away from somebody else?”
“Something like that.”
“It doesn’t matter does it, darling? Whether he’s alive or dead. I’m so deliciously sleepy, dear. Let’s sleep for a little while.”
Something awakened me, perhaps the little tilt of the bed as she left it. I turned over, feigning sleep, and through slitted lids saw her, nude-white in the small amber of the night light, staring back at me, her body slightly crouched, the dark hair tangled across her pale forehead. After I took several deep breaths, she went plodding silently over to the chair where I had tossed my clothing. Though I could not see her clearly I knew she was going through the pockets. She would find cigarettes, lighter, change and a thin packet of bills. All identification was back in the bureau drawer of my locked room in the Wharton.