She touched his cheek lightly. Very clean-shaven. He didn’t wake. Another long deep breath came out of him, almost a yawn, sounding very male.
She knew she could wake him, however, he wasn’t in a coma after all, and then the most disturbing thought came to her! She’d been with David already tonight! Damn! It had been safe, sanitary but still messy. She couldn’t wake Michael, not till she’d sunk down into a nice warm bath.
Hmmm. And she hadn’t even thought of that till now. Her clothes were still soiled. That was the whole trouble with being thirteen. Your brilliance was uneven. You forgot enormous things! Even Alicia had told her that.
“One minute, dear, you are a little computer whiz, and the next moment, you’re screaming ’cause you can’t find your dolls. I told you your dolls are in the cabinet. Nobody took your damned dolls! Oh, I’m so glad I don’t ever have to be thirteen again! You know I was thirteen when you were born!”
Tell me about it. And you were sixteen when I was three and you left me downtown in Maison Blanche and I was lost there for two hours! “I forgot, OK! Like I don’t take her downtown that much!” Who else but a sixteen-year-old mother would give an excuse like that? It wasn’t so bad. Mona had ridden the escalators up and down to her heart’s content.
“Take me in your arms,” she prayed, looking down at Michael. “I’ve had a terrible childhood!” But on he slept as if he’d been touched by the witch’s wand.
Maybe this wasn’t the night for getting him into bed. No, she’d rather everything be perfect for the assault. And not only had she been with David, she was soiled from the ground in the cemetery. Why, there were even a few dead leaves snarled in her hair, very Ophelia, but probably not very sexy.
Maybe it was the night for searching the attics. For finding the Victrola, and cranking it up. Maybe there were old records with it, that record that Ancient Evelyn used to play? Maybe it was time to meet Oncle Julien here in the shadows, and not time to be with Michael at all?
But he was so luscious there, gorgeously imperfect, her high prole Endymion, with the slight bump to his nose, and the soft creases in his forehead, very Spencer Tracy, yes, the man of her dreams. And a man in the hand is worth two ghosts in a dream.
And speaking of hands, look at it, his large, soft hand! Now that was a man’s hand. Nobody would say to him, “You have the fingers of a violinist.” And she used to find men like that sexy, the delicate kind, like Cousin David, with hairless chins, with eyes full of soul. Ah, her whole appreciation of masculinity was taking a turn for the rough and the deep and the better.
She touched Michael’s jaw, and the edge of his ear, his neck. She felt his curly black hair. Oh, nothing softer and finer than curly black hair. Her mother and Gifford had such fine black hair. But Mona’s red hair would never be soft, and then she caught the fragrance of his skin, very subtle and nice and warm, and she bent down and kissed his cheek.
His eyes opened, but it seemed he couldn’t see anything. She sank down beside him-just couldn’t stop herself, even though she knew this was an invasion of his privacy-and he turned over. What was her plan? Hmmm…She felt such a craving for him suddenly. It wasn’t even erotic. It was all a kind of swoony romance. She wanted to feel his arms around her; she wanted him to pick her up; she wanted him to kiss her; common things like that. A man’s arms, not a boy’s. They should dance. In fact, it was plain wonderful that there was no boy in him, that he was all wild beast in a way some men never would be, very jagged and roughened and overgrown, with skin-colored lips and slightly wild eyebrows.
She realized he was looking at her, and in the even light from the street, his face was pale yet clear.
“Mona!” he whispered.
“Yes, Uncle Michael. I got forgotten. It was a mix-up. Can I spend the night?”
“Well, honey, we have to call your father and mother.”
He started to sit up, deliciously rumpled, black hair tumbling over his eyes. He really was drugged, though, no doubt of it.
“Wrong, Uncle Michael!” she said quickly but gently. She put her hand on his chest. Ah, terrific. “My dad and mom are asleep. They think I’m with Uncle Ryan out in Metairie. And Uncle Ryan thinks I’m home with them. Don’t call anybody. You’ll just get everybody all excited, and I’ll have to take a cab home all alone and I don’t want to. I want to spend the night.”
“But they’ll realize…”
“My parents? You have it on good authority from me that they will not realize anything. Did you see my dad tonight, Uncle Michael?”
“Yeah, I did, honey.” He tried to stifle a yawn and failed. He looked very concerned for her suddenly, as if it wasn’t appropriate to yawn while discussing her alcoholic father.
“He’s not going to live very long,” she said in a bored voice. She didn’t want to talk about him either. “I can’t stand Amelia Street when they’re both drunk. Nobody there but Ancient Evelyn, and she never sleeps anymore. She’s watching them.”
“Ancient Evelyn,” he mused. “Such a lovely name. Do I know Ancient Evelyn?”
“Nope. She never leaves the house. She told them once to bring you up home, but they never did. She’s my great-grandmother.”
“Ah, yes, the Mayfairs of Amelia Street,” he said. “The big pink house.” He gave a little yawn again, and forced himself into a more truly upright position. “Bea pointed out the house. Nice house. Italianate. Bea said Gifford grew up there.”
Italianate. Architectural term, late nineteenth century. “Yeah, well, it’s a New Orleans bracketed style, as we call it,” she said. “Built 1882, remodeled once by an architect named Sully. Full of all kinds of junk from a plantation called Fontevrault.”
He was intrigued. But she didn’t want to talk history and plaster. She wanted him.
“So will you please let me stay here?” she asked. “I really really have to stay here now, Uncle Michael. I mean, like, there’s not really any other possibility now, logically, I mean. I should stay.”
He sat against the pillows, struggling to keep his eyes open.
She took his wrist suddenly. He didn’t seem to know what she was doing-that she was feeling the pulse the same way a doctor would do it. His hand was heavy and slightly cold, too cold. But the heartbeat was steady. It was OK. He wasn’t nearly as sick as her own father. Her own father wasn’t going to live six months. But it wasn’t his heart, it was his liver.
If she closed her eyes she could see the chambers of Michael’s heart. She could see things so brilliant and unnameable and complex as to be like modern painting-a sprawl of daring colors and clots and lines and swelling shapes! Ah. He was OK, this man. If she did get him into bed tonight, she wouldn’t kill him.
“You know your problem right now?” she asked. “It’s those bottles of medicine. Throw them in the trash. That much medicine will make anyone sick.”
“You think so?”
“You’re talking to Mona Mayfair, a twentyfold member of the Mayfair family, who knows things that others don’t know. Oncle Julien was my great-great-grandfather three times. You know what that means?”
“Three lines of descent, from Julien?”
“Yep, and then the other tangled lines from everybody else. Without a computer, no one could even put it all together. But I have a computer and I figured it all out. I’ve got more Mayfair blood in me than just about anybody in the whole family. It’s all ’cause my father and mother were too close as cousins to get married, but my father got my mother pregnant, and that was it. And besides, we’re all so intermarried it doesn’t make much difference…”
She stopped, she was doing her chattering number. Too much talk for a man his age who was this sleepy. Play it with more craft. “You’re OK, big boy,” she said. “Throw out the drugs.”