“Sit down and enjoy it,” he told her, and sat in one of the room’s two wing chairs. She sat in the other, pulling her knees to her chest.
“No,” he told her. “Put your legs down and cross them. Sit up straight. Pretend you’re at a cocktail party, only naked. Then relax.”
She did as he said, except that she did not relax. He could see it in the tension between her small ankles, in the unnaturally even way she lifted her glass to her mouth, in her darting glances. Really he didn’t know anything about her outside their shared interest except what he’d gathered from her speech, which was that she came from a lower-middle-class background, probably in the region but definitely not the city. Partially educated — probably more than her parents but not by a lot. He sensed that she was isolated, though whether by circumstance or choice he wasn’t sure. If he had to guess, he would pick circumstance. There was an abandoned quality to her, but perhaps she was just picking up the smell of the city she inhabited.
“Today why don’t we try something different?” He waited for her to look him in the eye. “Let’s have sex like normal people. I’ll go down on you nicely and then you can get on top and make yourself happy.”
“Are you telling me to?”
He shook his head. “No, Marion, merely suggesting today.”
She seemed disappointed. Remembering her long bike ride, he said, “But there’s a catch. You’re not allowed to come while I go down on you. If you do, there will be consequences.”
She looked down — she typically showed her submissiveness with slight abjection — but she was smiling a little.
He gave her what she’d come for and, after she left, wondered why he’d almost gone the other route. But what he felt most was vague disappointment, then a sense of aggravation that moved from her to himself before landing on his father.
He’d washed the sheets in the master suite before Marion’s visit but now only pulled them taut and aired them dry before making the bed. He wanted his father to sleep on what had happened there. If his father noticed — Clay had no idea whether he would or not — it would only confirm his opinion of his only offspring. If he didn’t, Clay would enjoy the joke privately, which was the way he enjoyed everything that he enjoyed.
His father’s flight was very late, no doubt infuriating the traveler, so it wasn’t until morning that Clay sat across from him. Just like the good old days: coffee, his father’s newspaper, and silence broken only by his father’s occasional comment on whatever objectionable story he was reading about politics or economics. And as always his father looking like a picture staged in some catalog trying to sell unnecessary products to people who already own everything else. The clothes always correct for the occasion and falling just right (even this morning’s smoking robe and pajama pants), leaning alternately back or forward at an angle posed to look natural, full hair brushed back from his forehead, handsome if bland when he looked at you straight on but hawkish in profile — more interesting and more dangerous.
Gerard Fontenot came from an old New Orleans family, founded by the arrival from Paris by way of Malta of a Civil War — era merchant who profited from both the war and the New World’s craving for sweets. He quickly married a local girl, and soon the family had consolidated and then diluted and squandered great sugar, lumber, and other forms of wealth. Their political power — mostly municipal, though the Fontenots were not without friends in Baton Rouge and Washington — had fared more steadily.
Gerard, realizing that power cannot be fully substantiated without access to wealth, had married for money much more than love — an Episcopalian from a good Atlanta family who was considerably less attractive to her opposite sex than he was to his. He’d insisted on her formal conversion to Roman Catholicism and implicit permission to conduct numerous but mostly discreet affairs with more attractive women, but he’d allowed her to set almost all the other terms of their merger. In her final decade — she’d died young, though, because she had never been beautiful, not tragically so — she’d encouraged him to pursue diplomacy. His long stints abroad provided her with several advantages, not least the higher level of discretion it afforded his extramarital adventures and the fact that she was left mostly alone with her son.
It seemed to Clay that he had been blamed for all of it, but especially his mother’s inferior gene pool and superior financial situation, both of which his father resented. Most of Clay’s money depended on his father’s goodwill for a few more months, but his mother had seen to his temporary comfort and eventual freedom so long as his requirements were not too extravagant. This — and the impending thirtieth birthday that would mark his economic emancipation — made Clay increasingly reckless with his father, whose only good turn to him had been helping with Johanna. And that had been something more owed than given, more extracted than offered.
Never one with a taste for a pound of flesh, his father preferred to destroy the soul rather than the body. Clay had delayed his financial emancipation by five full years, which likely had cost him tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars at the hands of his father’s accountants, who seemed to be quite good at what his father called “moving things around for best advantage.” Clay knew to whose advantage these movements were. He could have tried blackmail instead — he had at least some goods on his father that day — but stupid as he was, he was smart enough to know that he couldn’t win any kind of long game that way. He didn’t so much mind the financial losses even he could read from the spreadsheets the accountants sent — he would still have more money than he could ever figure out how to spend — but the additional five years of his father’s shadow, now nearly endured, had been a genuine punishment. So perhaps he had been punished, and it was only reparations he had left to pay.
Clay excused himself to wash his hands and returned with a paper of his own. He opened it, folded it inside out and in half, and pushed it toward his father. He watched his father’s eyes move from his Wall Street Journal to the rectangle Clay had put under his nose: the sketch of the dead Ladislav in the Times-Picayune.
“Friend of yours?” asked his father without even a pause.
Clay looked over his father’s shoulder into the kitchen, holding his nerve. “Funny thing is that I met him at one of your parties. In Brussels.”
“One of the biggest challenges of that job,” his father said in his chatting-up-a-stranger-in-an-airport-bar tone, “was that one could never control the guest list. All kinds of people coming and going just because they were someone’s nephew or had slept with someone’s wife. One of the reasons I returned to private life, truth be told.”
The lie was so fluid and clean that Clay wondered if his father really did not recognize Ladislav or if he didn’t remember him — the catastrophe of his son’s adult life just a slight brush with something vaguely unpleasant in his own.
Clay replayed the party that night he had first met the vile Czech, his father saying, “My son could stand to get laid, truth be told,” and turning to Clay, saying, “My friend here caters to a variety of tastes.” For a moment Clay thought his father knew about his particular proclivities, but then he understood that his father still thought he was gay, a suspicion he’d developed when Clay had announced a dislike for football at the age of eleven and a suspicion that his father — a man not given to doubt his own beliefs — had never released despite bountiful contradictory evidence.
“He was acquainted with my friend Johanna.” Clay emphasized the word acquainted, trying to make it sound ominous, which of course it was.