It would not come to pass. At any rate, she was rapidly becoming a copy of her mother, and that alone was enough to make him keep his distance. Letting the conversation ride by, he glanced across the group at Mrs. Daisy Van Alstyne and held his eyes against her until she met them. Her gaze shifted away quickly; color crawled up her cheeks. It made him smile slightly with recollection. It had often amused him to speculate how much she knew about the extent of his obligation to her. Everything I am, he thought dryly, I owe to you, dear old Daisy.
She was-what? — fifty-one now? She must have been about thirty-seven then. A thirty-seven-year-old blonde with abundant hips and breasts and, even then, the suggestion of a double chin. Her husband had been deeply engaged in international finance in those days and rarely spent more than a fourth of his time at home.
For Steve Wyatt it had been an adolescent summer of sexual fantasies. He and his second cousin had bored a peephole through the wall above the john in the ladies’ loo at the back of Chisolm’s Restaurant; at night they took turns shivering in the damp chill of the seaside woods, watching through it. One night, on a dare, Steve had gone around the building and intercepted a waitress, a fat jolly girl with pendulous breasts. He had tried to make a pass at her. She had laughed. “You’re a kid. Come back when you’re big enough.”
“Big enough where?” But she had only laughed and skipped away, leaving him red-faced, aggravating his sexual tension.
One evening in July or August he had gone into the Van Alstynes’ house after a tennis match on their courts, and had found the guest-bathroom door ajar and Mrs. Van Alstyne unexpectedly there, standing in front of the bathroom mirror with her blouse unbuttoned to the waist, posing with the tip of her tongue caught in the corner of her mouth, both breasts heavy and white, lifted in her palms. Preoccupied and consumed, incredibly she hadn’t seen him behind the half-open door. Passionately he watched her tickling her own breasts. He held his breath, wide-eyed, not stirring; but suddenly she saw him.
He wheeled in fear, confused; but she whispered, “Wait?”
She came to him slowly; she reached for his hand and would not let him go. She sat down on the edge of the guest-room bed. He stood looking wildly down at her while she tugged the tails of her blouse free of her skirt and pushed his hand against one of her soft heavy breasts. Tormented by fear and hardening excitement, he watched her eager eyes and felt the quick rise of her breathing, the sudden warm hard swell of her nipple under his palm. He sat down slowly, almost hypnotically, terrified of what she might do, just as terrified of what she might not do.
A slow smile spread across her face. She disengaged his hand and stood up languidly. He saw the blouse come off and the skirt drop. He looked away, afraid he would have an orgasm right then. The hard pressure in the lap of his pants made him feel hot-faced and ludicrous.
She stood swaying, a thick sweet fragrance of colognes and gin. He looked out of the corner of his eye in time to see her slip her panties down, exposing a tangle of hair which, freed, exploded into a soft hazy triangle, startlingly dark against the pale weight of her thick inner thighs.
His mouth was dry. He shook his head, afraid to speak. She tipped his face up with one hand, and he saw her mystical smile, vague and submissive and demanding all at once.
Her hand touched the front of his trousers. There was sudden flame. She brought him to his feet and undid his buckle and fly. He blinked very fast. She helped him push his underpants down and moved close against him. He felt her pull him down onto the bed. She was moist inside; she guided him into her. He lay on top of her while she curled her fat legs around him and began to pump.
His body felt rock-hard. Braced on his elbows, he held his hands cupped over her huge loose breasts, squeezing them with sucking rhythm. Her body came alive against him, pitching and bucking, and all the while she stared directly into his eyes with a look of incandescent heat.
In his agony of pleasure he went back into her again and again, unable to leave her alone for more than a half-hour at a time. Sometimes he could come twice or even three times before he lost his erection. She kept exciting him over again by the swell of her breasts when he was inside her, her cries of anguish, until most of the night was spent.
The rest of that summer he hadn’t been able to stay away from her; she wouldn’t have let him if he could. She was there whenever he came-waiting, aroused and tense, to do as her violent needs demanded. His own passions, stored up so long, matched her uncontrollable lust. Yet when he was not with her he felt sick with revulsion against the force which, greater than himself, drew him to her. She was ugly, going to fat; her compulsive hunger for sex-not for him, but for it-was as impersonal as cannibalism; she was intent on nothing but her own gratification. Yet through the spiral of degradation he felt growth, a sense of dynamic power surging in him. Lying with her, drained, limp, exhausted, he felt alive in his manhood for the first time.
She made of him an expert, ardent lover. After that summer he never bedded her again. She found other lovers; he found other women like her. He was never without a woman for long, usually an older woman. He had learned from her-he turned it onto the other ones, knowing how to suck them dry, make them ache in torment waiting for him, make their bodies sing with the drug of him.
Seated off to the side of the lawn party, listening to the conversation but not taking part, he watched the guests with secret amusement. Van Alstyne, a clumsy, pompous idiot still, after all these years, evidently unaware his wife was putting horns on him every chance she got. Daisy, squirming in her seat, not meeting Steve’s glance. Beth, the blonde daughter, blithely unaware, chattering on about clothes and charities.
Finally, near midnight, the guests rose to leave. Wyatt’s mother steered him stubbornly toward Beth’s elbow, but he remained oblivious, and in due course the Van Alstynes trundled off in their determinedly anonymous Oldsmobile.
Fran Wyckliffe Wyatt sent the servants to bed and went striding across the foyer. “I’m pouring in the study, if you’d care to join me,” she said, and thundered into the oak-paneled den.
He ambled in after her and said, “You’re making an ass of yourself, trying to throw me at that bitch.”
“Balls.”
“You’re a Goddamn snob,” he said.
“Of course I’m a snob. I want my son to mingle with his own kind. The Van Alstynes are most acceptable-and they live damned comfortably.”
“Comfortable” was one of those words in his mother’s vocabulary that needed interpreting. It translated to mean filthy rich.
He said with a straight face, “But she wears such distressing clothes.”
“Balls. She’s got marvelous taste in clothes.”
Wyatt grinned, accepting the brandy she had poured; he swirled it gently, sniffing the bouquet.
His mother sat down with one of her bony legs skewed over the arm of the chair. “She’s a lovely thing, Steve. You might do far worse.”
“She’s dull. I’ve taken her out half a dozen times. Take my word for it, I’ve had more fun touring the BMT subway.”
“She’s a hell of an attractive girl. I can’t understand why you’ve never sneaked her upstairs during one of these deadly parties and raped hell out of her.”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
“I’d know.”
“The last woman I took upstairs in this house gave me the clap,” he said. “This is good brandy.”