And not off-the-wall mad, because she was able to choose what was to remain fantasy and what was to be enjoyed in the flesh.
So she didn’t dart under the table at Correggio, or let the lunch conversation amount to anything more than the lightest sort of flirting. Gregory Schuyler’s good opinion was far too important for her to jeopardize it for whatever rewards his pale body might provide.
She was back at the gallery in time to receive a call from Reginald Barron. Uncle Emory had completed another piece, and would she want to include it in the show?
“And he’s working on another. He’ll do like that, one right after the other, and then he’ll just stop for a spell. I know you were talking about having a catalog prepared, so you’d need to have everything by a certain date.”
She thought of his youth, his broad-shouldered masculinity, his adorable shyness. I have gold studs in my titties, Reginald. I have a hairless pussy. Do you want to come over and play?
“That’s very thoughtful,” she told him. “Suppose we use the end of the month as a cutoff date? I’ll arrange to come by then and pick up whatever’s completed.” And then she’d make another run to Brooklyn a week or two before the show; the catalog would already be closed by then, but if there was any Emory Allgood work outstanding, she wanted it in her storage locker, not where some smooth opportunist could snatch it out from under her.
After she’d hung up she had a thought. Suppose she rang him back, asked him if he could possibly come in today with the piece he’d called about. If it wasn’t too big, if he could get it into a cab...
No, the only reason she thought of that was because, if he brought the piece to the gallery — or, even better, to her apartment — she could have him out of his pants and into hers in nothing flat. And that was something she was determined not to let happen.
Not until after his uncle’s show.
She sent Chloe home at five, stayed on herself for another hour and a half. She walked home, detouring to pick up half of a barbecued chicken at Boston Market. She ate it at her kitchen table — she had an eat-in kitchen, Marilyn Fairchild had found her a sweetheart of an apartment — and then drew a tub and soaked in it. Lying there, she felt herself stirred, and touched herself. Just a little.
She dried off and got in bed and played some more. Not all of the paraphernalia from Pleasure Chest required a partner, so she tried out some of her new toys. But she reined herself in, didn’t let herself climax, because it was Friday night and she felt adventurous and you could have a good time all by yourself, you could have an orgasm as powerful as the best anyone else could give you, but what you couldn’t have was an adventure.
She thought about the men she could call, and a woman or two she could probably call, but none of them were what she wanted, not tonight. She wanted a stranger.
Marilyn Fairchild had found herself a stranger, one who’d turned out to be a little stranger than she’d bargained for. God, what an awful thing. And what could it have been like for her, those last few moments?
Maybe she was unconscious, passed out. Maybe she never saw it coming, maybe it was over before she knew it.
But maybe not.
She imagined hands on her throat, a weight pressing down on her. Asphyxiation was supposed to have an erotic element, God only knew how many idiots died every year hanging themselves to intensify their orgasms. It was probably safer with a partner — if you wanted that kind of thing, and if you trusted the person to know when to stop.
Maybe Marilyn had wanted Creighton to choke her — just a little, just to get her over the edge. Maybe his hands had had a mind of their own.
Maybe she came and went, just like that.
She should run it by Maury. Maybe he could try it as a defense strategy if all else failed. Except lots of people had tried variations of that, hadn’t they? It was rough sex, that’s the way she wanted it, and it just went too far. Had any jury ever bought that one? If so, she couldn’t remember it.
Well, she didn’t want to get what Marilyn got. But she wanted some excitement, a stranger if not a strangler. Where should she go looking for him?
She put on makeup and perfume. Changed her earrings for her amethyst studs. Put on a little black dress with not a thing under it except the gold in her nipples. Slipped on a pair of Blahniks, changed her mind, went with the Prada pumps. Like it mattered, like anybody was going to be looking at her shoes.
She had to wait ten minutes for a cab. “Stelli’s,” she told the driver. “Do you know where that is?”
fourteen
Auction time.
He didn’t see why he should feel anxious. He remembered something Lee Trevino had said in response to talk about the pressure involved in trying to sink a putt in a tournament playoff: Pressure? If you make it you get a million dollars, but if you miss it you still get half a million. That’s not pressure. Pressure’s when you’re in a two-dollar Nassau with five bucks in your pocket.
And where was the pressure for him? Esther Blinkoff at Crown had already given a floor bid of more money than he had ever expected to find on a contract with his name on it. The worst that could happen, the absolute worst that could happen, was that the other four prospective bidders would hear the numbers Crown had put on the board, shrug their shoulders, and go home. And he’d get an advance of $1,100,000.
He’d been up late the night before, fooling around on the computer, then channel surfing. AMC was running Casablanca, and he told himself he’d just watch it for a few minutes, but he’d never been able to turn that film off and couldn’t this time, either. He got misty when they played “La Marseillaise,” the way he always did, and he was still there and still paying attention when Bogart told Claude Rains that it looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
It must have been close to three when he got into bed, and not quite eight when he rolled out of it. He was working on his second cup of coffee when the phone rang at ten after nine, and it was Roz.
“The horses are at the starting gate,” she said. “Actually they’re just leaving the paddock, because I don’t start making calls until ten o’clock. Is this your first auction, John? Well, do you know how it goes?”
“The high bidder gets me.”
“I mean the mechanics of it. They’re all at their desks, and I call one of them and tell them where the bidding stands, and they go into a huddle and get back to me, and then I call the next one. It’s not like sitting in the gallery at Christie’s and bing bang boom it’s over. It can take all day, and sometimes more than a day.”
“So this could be continued on Monday?”
“No,” she said, “because everybody’s on notice that today is the day, and by five o’clock you’re going to have a new publisher. Or a new old publisher, if you wind up with Esther.”
“At one point one.”
“Or at x-point-x, if she exercises her topping privileges, which she got by giving us the floor.”
“Do the others all know about the floor?”
“Honey,” she said, “everybody in America knows about the floor. It was in Publisher’s Lunch yesterday. Believe me, all four of them know they can’t play for less than seven figures.”
Publisher’s Lunch was a daily e-newsletter, full of industry news and gossip and free on request. He’d subscribed for a while, then unsubscribed when he realized how much time it was draining out of his day. The fact that they’d reported the floor bid somehow made it more real.
“John,” she was saying, “what I want to know is whether or not you want me to keep you in the picture. I can call you whenever somebody bids or passes, but I know you’re working on the book, and maybe you’d rather not be interrupted, in which case you won’t hear from me unless there’s something I need to clear with you. Or until the auction is over, whichever comes first.”