Taylor smiled at her. “And you don’t have the meanness in you to tell her the truth.”
“What good would it do?”
“Oh, it might do something. Next time Sydney drops in on us, let’s ask her about her mom. It might just throw her off-stride. It just might do her a world of good to be thrown off-stride. I can’t imagine that she often relinquishes control.”
“No, that would be cruel.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “You’ve got to toughen up, Lindsay. Sydney needs to be taken down a couple of pegs, she needs to know that her life can’t go along according to her dictates.”
“No, it hasn’t always. Why, even the prince—”
“What about the prince? Her husband, right?”
But Lindsay’s head was down. A thick tendril of deeply waving hair fell forward, nearly hitting her salad. Taylor leaned over to tuck the hair behind her ear. She flinched, drawing back.
“No, love, don’t do that. Remember, you’ve got to keep me reassured.”
“Did you make love to this Valerie Balack?”
“Yes.”
He twirled spaghetti around in his spoon and took a big bite. He waited. Please show me some jealousy, he was thinking. Just a dollop of jealousy. Snipe at me. Be a bitch. Turn red and yell.
Instead her shoulders slumped. Defeat fitted her better. She was far more used to defeat.
He said deliberately and slowly, “However, I’ve never in my entire adult life made love with a woman who was more passionate, more loving, more giving, than you.”
She looked up, paling; then her beautiful dark blue eyes darkened further.
“Will you make love with me when we get home?”
She looked at the lettuce now wilted on her plate. When she spoke, she surprised him. “What if I can’t feel anything this time? What if that one time was an aberration, an accident?”
Taylor leaned forward and took her hands between his. He spoke quietly and firmly as a preacher, his voice and look filled with conviction. “I promise you that’s just not true. There’s no going back now that you’ve crossed the line with me. There’s no more frightened Lindsay, no more flinching when I touch you. I would never lie to you.
“I swear that when you kiss me—any minute now, in fact—you’ll want me just as much as you did last night. Once the dam bursts, so to speak, there’s no stopping the flow. You’ll have a lifetime of pleasure with me now. It’s true. You can trust me. You don’t have to worry about it ever again.”
“I never thought of it like that.”
“You’re beautiful and you have some lettuce between your front teeth.”
She howled, clapping her hands over her mouth, and he laughed, slapping her hands away, drawing her face toward him, and he met her halfway over the table and kissed her, once, then again and again until she was flushed and laughing herself. He felt happier than he could ever remember.
Unfortunately, that evening there was to be no repetition of the previous night. Nor was there any chance Lindsay was pregnant. Lindsay was embarrassed, but his matter-of-factness cast a whole new light on things. She came out of the bathroom so pale Taylor stopped in his undressing and stared at her. “Let me guess. You’ve contracted the plague.”
“No, it isn’t plague. It’s worse.”
“Let me check your armpits just to make sure.”
“No, no, it’s just that I can’t—I wondered why I’d put on two pounds and hadn’t eaten anything to deserve it, the water retention, you know, and now…”
“Oh,” he said. “No, that isn’t plague. That’s just plain bad luck. That’s to bring me down off my high and to punish me for being a sex maniac. And you as well.”
“At least it didn’t happen last night.”
“Thank God,” he said fervently, and hugged her. “You hurting?”
“A little bit.”
“Get into bed and I’ll get you some of those magic pills.”
And that was that.
When he held her, finally feeling her body relax as the pills worked, he said, “Don’t you forget I love you even though your body is giving me the Bronx cheer.”
On Tuesday, Taylor cracked “The Case of the Embezzling Wife.” He tended to give his cases names, thinking that when he was eighty and his mind was going on him, maybe he could remember his cases if he identified them well, giving them Perry Mason-type names. He met with the husband at noon to give him the evidence he needed. There was no need to commiserate with the man, he was too furious. He’d already called the cops on his wife and contacted the district attorney.
Taylor was whistling, thinking about the individualized monitoring program he was going to create for the Norman Communication Company to try to trap a hacker. Now that he knew the computer’s control access language, he was going to write in a program. He was sure he’d seen this hacker’s modus operandi before. Yeah, he was going to set a trap for this guy.
It was a sunny cold day. Beautiful clear air. A perfect day in New York despite the forty-degree tag on the temperature. He thought of Lindsay and smiled. At breakfast that morning, while he ate a bowl of cereal and she a piece of dry toast, she’d said in the most natural way imaginable, “Let’s go out on Thursday night, okay?”
“Thursday night? Something special happening?”
She flushed and he frowned over his spoon of wheat flakes.
“Well, yeah, at least for me.”
He took another bite of his cereal. “Okay. Let’s call Enoch and Sheila and see if they’d like to do something. Good idea.”
“That isn’t what I meant, Taylor!”
“Oh?” He stared at her blankly.
She flushed more deeply, then saw the laughter in his eyes, and threw the half piece of toast at him.
“You’re awful and ought to be circumcised.”
“No, not circumcised! Anything but that, mistress.”
She frowned. “No, that’s not right.”
He was laughing so hard he couldn’t help himself. He rose from the table, grabbed her beneath her arms, and hugged her so tight she squeaked.
“Let’s stay in Thursday night and celebrate for about twelve hours.”
He was smiling like a besotted fool as he wondered how her ski shoot was going. At least it was a gorgeous day and she was wearing ski clothes, so she’d be warm enough. He would have thought the best place to take ski pictures would be at a ski slope. But no, they were at Washington Square.
Actually, the shoot wasn’t going well at all. Lindsay looked over at the director and sighed. He had an attitude problem, a common-enough malady, but he was both arrogant and ignorant, which made things nearly impossible because the photographer was good but mush. He had no control over anything. Lindsay was nothing more than a stupid bimbo, the crew a useless group of grunts, the makeup people faggots and hags. He was, in short, the nephew of the ski-clothing-store president. The ad people were biting their nails, trying to keep peace, trying to give the jerk suggestions couched in the most diplomatic phrases, but nothing was working. He was demanding and contradictory and just plain stupid. Demos had left, he was so pissed, just giving her a commiserating nod. She’d mouthed, “Coward,” at him and he’d agreed.
Lindsay sighed again, leaning against the set, waiting, waiting, waiting. The male model, Barry, had given the director the finger—when his back was turned—and was sitting over at one of the stone tables playing chess. Washington Square was an odd place. Serious chess players, most of them old as the square itself, played chess next to dope dealers who were even now conducting business as usual. Prostitutes eyed her to see what she had that they didn’t. Business appeared to be brisk for both sets of folk. And there was the crew, pissed as hell and bored and grousing. The elaborate set, for which the ski clothing company had shelled out over one hundred thousand dollars, was sitting there dark and heavy and towering some forty feet in the air, and so far unused. After endless hassles with the city, the ad agency had gotten the necessary permits, but the director hadn’t figured out yet how to get Eden and the ski lift together in the same shot. There was even a lift chair, but she hadn’t sat in it yet. The gondola swung in the light breeze above her head.