The Sweetman Curve Page 5

  The shining white Fleetwood drew up against the dusty roadside. Mark, as silent and obedient as ever, switched off the engine. Then there was nothing but the gentle hum of the air-conditioning, and the sound of the hitchhiker’s desert boots as he came loping along the pavement to catch up with them.

  The hitchhiker looked in at the tinted window, and Mark courteously lowered it from the switch console by the driver’s seat. He was young, with curly sun-bleached hair, eyes the colour of faded violets, and a football player’s strong jawline. His red plaid shirt was open to the waist, baring his muscular chest and his hard, flat belly. There were three gold chains around his neck, and a gold band around his wrist, but the canvas kitbag he carried over his shoulder was battered and worn.

  ‘Thanks for stopping,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting there for quite a while.’

  Adele looked him up and down with cool, aloof appraisal.

  ‘It wasn’t a very intelligent place to hitchhike, was it?’ she asked him. ‘I almost missed seeing you.’

  The boy rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand. ‘What happened was, the ride I picked up from Laguna Beach was forking off for El Toro. I told him I’d rather hop off here, and try for a ride straight to Santa Ana. I don’t like to thumb for rides on the freeways, the heat always pick you up.’

  ‘Is that where you’re headed?’ she asked him. ‘Santa Ana?’

  He shook his head. ‘San Bernardino, really. But I can get myself another ride at Santa Ana if you’re heading north.’

  She smiled, her famous frosty movie smile. ‘You’d better get in,’ she said. ‘We’re going all the way to Palm Springs, and we can drop you off at the Riverside cloverleaf. Mark, would you unlock the doors, please?’ Mark flicked the door-lock switch, and the doors released. The boy opened up, and climbed into the back of the car, twisting his pack off his back and setting it down on the white-carpeted floor. Mark locked the doors again, raised the window, and drove off.

  ‘I sure appreciate this,’ said the boy, wiping his sweaty forehead with a grey handkerchief. ‘I thought I’d be standing out there all night.’

  ‘It’s the least I could do,’ said Adele, wrapping her fur stole around her more tightly as the temperature dropped.

  The boy sat back. ‘By the way,’ he told her, ‘my name’s Ken Irwin, from Butte, Montana. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.’

  ‘I’m sure I’m charmed,’ replied Adele with sarcasm the boy missed.

  ‘I’ve been down here looking for work. I’m what you might call a male domestic. That’s what I do to eat, anyway. My real target is to make it in the movies.’

  ‘That’s everyone’s target,’ murmured Adele.

  Ken began to button up his shirt.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

  He gave her a confused, nervous smile. ‘Well, nothing, ma’am. It’s just a little cold in here, that’s all. I’ve been standing out in the sun.’

  Adele looked at him, her brown eyes liquid and deep. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and didn’t seem to know whether to carry on buttoning up his shirt or not.

  ‘Go on,’ she said at last. ‘We don’t want you to catch a chill, after all.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and buttoned himself up to the neck.

  They joined Interstate 5, the Santa Ana Freeway, and headed north over the glaring concrete. On their right, the Santa Ana mountains rose into ragged crowns of white cloud. Mark commented: ‘Maybe the heatwave’s going to die off tomorrow, Ms. Corliss.’

  Ken Irwin glanced at her. She looked back at him, her haughty expression almost daring him to speak.

  ‘You’re not the Ms. Corliss, are you?’ he asked her. ‘Not Adele Corliss?’

  She crossed her long legs. Her white satin dress was slit up the side, and he could see her bare, perfectly-tanned thigh.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, trying to sound amused. ‘Didn’t you recognise me?’

  Ken blushed. ‘Well, yes, I mean I thought I did when you first stopped. But it just seemed that—’

  ‘That what? That I was too young?’

  ‘Well, shoot, no. But you’re very—’

  She reached across with her left hand and held his wrist. ‘Very what?’

  He swallowed. ‘You’re very classy,’ he said, clumsily. ‘I mean, you’re terrifically good-looking, close to. Just like your movies.’

  She watched him for a while in silence. He cleared his throat, and sat forward in his seat, his hands twitchily clasped, throwing a quick look at her now and again to see if she was annoyed.

  In the end, she gave a tinkly little laugh.

  ‘Ken,’ she said, ‘you’re really very cute. Do you know that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nobody ever called me cute before.’

  She reached out with her fingertips and touched his forehead, his nose and his lips. He didn’t attempt to kiss her fingers, as many men had. He just seemed to be awkward and confused, and overwhelmed by her fame and her cold sexuality. She leaned towards him until their faces were only inches apart.

  ‘I’m calling you cute,’ she whispered. ‘Is that good enough for you? The great Adele Corliss, calling you cute?’

  He shifted uneasily in his seat. ‘Well, it surely is. I’m flattered.’

  ‘Don’t be. It’s the truth. Now, why don’t you open that bar for me, and take out a couple of splits of champagne.’

  Ken, with relief, let go of her hand, and knelt down to open the bar. It was refrigerated, with racks of Krug champagne, and ready-mixed sours and martinis.

  ‘Use the tulip glasses,’ she told him. ‘Only Hollywood starlets and Canadians use saucer glasses. They dissipate the bubbles.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Ken, and carefully, with an amateur’s frown, poured out two glasses of champagne.

  ‘Well,’ smiled Adele, ‘here’s to our celebration.’

  Ken lifted his glass. ‘I’m not quite sure what we’re supposed to be celebrating.’

  She sipped the tingly, dry champagne. ‘We’re celebrating your employment, of course. You said you were a male domestic, didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, sure, but—’

  ‘But what? Do you want the work or don’t you? I have a twelve-bedroom house at Palm Springs that needs constant attention. Dusting, waxing, vacuum cleaning, polishing. Isn’t that the kind of thing you do?’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  She touched his shoulder as if she were conferring a knighthood on him. ‘In that case, everything’s perfect. You can be my man.’

  Ken bit his lip. ‘The truth is, Ms. Corliss, I have a couple of jobs lined up already.’

  ‘Cancel them.’

  ‘Ms. Corliss, I really did promise these people.’

  ‘Cancel them. I like you too much to let you go. The second I saw you by the side of the road, I thought, there is a boy with fire. And what finer combination can a man and a woman have than fire and ice?’

  ‘Ms. Corliss—’

  ‘Look at me,’ she commanded. She sat up straight, and let the mink stole slide from her shoulders. In the front of the car, Mark glanced up at her in his rear view mirror, and then turned his eyes impassively back to the highway. Mark wasn’t jealous. Adele’s body, after all, belonged to her, and if she happened to share it with him on nights when she felt fifty-nine and lonesome, well, that was nothing to get possessive about. He would just as soon spend the afternoon tinkering with the Cadillac’s air injector reactor system as lie naked on her white silk bedcover while she moaned and sighed about the beauty of black balls between white thighs.

  Ken Irwin, though, was embarrassed and aroused. He knew how old she must be. I mean, Jesus, she was in movies with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. But he couldn’t help himself from looking downwards at her clinging white satin dress, and the deep V-shaped neckline that exposed a firm, perfect, siliconized cleavage. She had paid thousands of dollars to have a startling body, and it was impossible for anyone, whatever their sexual tastes, to ignore it. He look
ed up again. Her eyes were distant and frigid, and yet their coldness, in itself, was unnervingly erotic.

  ‘Ms. Corliss,’ he said throatily, ‘I don’t know whether you’re trying to make a fool out of me or not. I’m not truly smart enough to tell. But the truth is that I’ve already signed on with a domestic agency in San Bernardino, and the work’s regular and honest, and what you’re offering is kind of wild to say the least.’

  She wrapped herself up in her furs again. Her cold expression did not alter. ‘Don’t you like being wild?’ she asked him. ‘Don’t tell me you like to dust and wax and nothing else.’

  He looked sheepish. ‘Well, sure. I’m as red-blooded as the next guy. But I’ve kind of worked out this plan, the way I’m going to do things, and I was figuring I’d stick to it.’

  Adele watched him for a while, and then she reached out and gently placed her hand on his blue denim thigh. He looked nervously down at it, as if it was likely to scurry up his leg like some Arctic scorpion, and sting him where it hurt most.

  ‘You’re afraid, aren’t you?’ she asked him. ‘That’s what it is – you’re actually afraid.’

  He coloured.

  She raised her champagne glass to him. They were driving through Orange now, on their way to the Riverside Expressway. Whitewashed houses and palms and telephone poles flowed past.

  ‘If you’re afraid,’ she whispered, in a voice which froze him, ‘then we shall have to do what we can to restore your confidence.’

  Mark, inaudibly, sighed.

  Ken Irwin said, ‘I’m really not sure, Ms. Corliss. I think I’d rather get out at the Riverside cloverleaf.’ Adele laughed. ‘You are stolid, aren’t you? A real mountain man from Montana. Have some more champagne, for God’s sake. It helps you forget who you are.’

  *

  It was already dusk by the time the Fleetwood bounced through the wrought-iron gates of the hacienda which Adele Corliss had been given in settlement after her fourth divorce. The desert sky was grainy and purple, and Ken Irwin had to strain his eyes through the tinted automobile windows to see the private manicured paradise of lush clipped lawns, orderly yuccas, carefully-trained dragon trees, poinsettia, magnolia and oranges. A haze of multi-coloured moisture hung in the air from the garden sprays.

  Mark, humming to himself, swung the car around on the gravel drive in front of the house, killed the engine, and then opened the doors for them. Ken climbed out cautiously, and the air of a Palm Springs evening was fragrant and warm after the sterile frigidity of the Fleetwood. He looked up at the house, an E-shaped imitation of a Spanish wine-grower’s mansion, with two enclosing wings. It was rendered with rough plaster, and colour-washed in primrose yellow, and its walls were a riot of wrought-iron balconies and grille-covered windows and arches and verandahs, with flowering creepers trailing from its red-clay roof. A fountain of plump concrete cherubs splashed softly in the twilight, and across to the left, Ken could make out the bright lilac reflection of a swimming pool, mutely surrounded by simulated Roman statues of naked nymphs and sultry discus-throwers.

  Somewhere in the gardens, someone was clipping a hedge. The patient peck-peck-peck of the shears sounded like the call of a plaintive bird.

  Adele stepped out of the car, and stretched out her arms to the fading warmth of the sun.

  ‘This is a pretty nice place,’ said Ken.

  ‘You sound as if you don’t approve,’ Adele said.

  ‘Oh no, it’s great, really,’ he quickly said.

  Adele came around and grasped Ken’s hand. He was surprised, when she stood next to him, how short she was. Even in her white stiletto-heeled shoes, she couldn’t have topped more than five feet two or three. On the movie screen, she always appeared so lissome and tall, but maybe she was like Alan Ladd, and stood on a box. Despite himself, despite his real reasons for being there, he felt an urge to put his arm around her and protect her, this petite and sexy blonde who was old enough to be his grandmother. But she tugged his hand and said, ‘Come along inside. We can freshen up and have something to drink. You like tequila?’

  ‘I prefer beer, to tell you the truth.’

  An elderly butler in a cream tuxedo and brown tie was waiting by the carved Spanish oak door. His nose was as curved as a toucan’s beak, and grey hair was laboriously greased down. Adele said, ‘Good evening, Holman. Have a quiet day?’ and the old man nodded and then abruptly took out his handkerchief and blew his nose with a loud snort. He ushered Ken inside as if Ken was a brush salesman, or the man who comes to clean out the Jacuzzi.

  The hallway was flagged with brown Mexican tiles, and the rough-plastered walls were divided into archways, through which Ken could see a spacious living room, with a crackling log fire, and a sombre but impressive dining room with a swamp oak table. There was an aromatic smell of sandalwood and polish and expensive leather upholstery.

  ‘My ex-husband, that was Roger Sumter, rather fancied himself as Emiliano Zapata,’ she remarked, handing her mink stole to the butler. ‘We used to have dreadful paintings of Mexican folk heroes and bullfights all over the walls before the divorce. I let him have them back, and believe me that was an even greater relief than getting rid of him.’

  A Mexican maid in a dowdy black dress appeared through one of the archways. She was stern-faced and stolid, and wore elastic support hose. She said, ‘Your bath, Ms. Corliss?’

  ‘Our bath, yes,’ corrected Adele, turning to Ken in her tight white satin with such a girlish smile that he almost felt as if he were a new bridegroom, brought home to mother on his wedding night.

  ‘Whatever you say, Ms. Corliss,’ replied the Mexican woman sourly, and flapped away on plastic sandals to do her duty.

  ‘You like the house?’ Adele asked Ken. ‘We’ll take a look around when we’re all freshened up. Actually, the whole place is sickeningly bogus, but don’t you think that sickeningly bogus is better than nitpickingly stylish?’

  ‘Well, uh, possibly,’ said Ken.

  Adele took his hand, and led him across the tiled hall, and through the archway that took them to the main staircase. It was oak, each step of which had been glasspapered down and then abused with hammers and chisels to make it look as if Spanish servants had been shuffling up and down them for three centuries.

  Adele said, ‘Awful, isn’t it? But Roger preferred custom-made antiques to the real thing. He didn’t understand the difference between the slowly acquired patina of age, and beating the hell out of something in ten minutes. He approached our marriage in the same way.’

  They climbed the stairs, and reached a long galleried landing. The windows along the gallery were all thrown open to the warm dry desert air, and Ken could smell the strange coolness of the garden sprays.

  ‘Don’t you get lonesome here?’ he asked her.

  She led him onwards, down the landing, towards a lighted doorway at the far end.

  ‘My analyst says that being lonesome is simply the social manifestation of my uniqueness,’ she said. ‘That, of course, is typical analyst’s bullshit. Being lonesome is an expression of the fact that when you’re a movie star, you only have two kinds of people in your life, greedy sycophants and jealous enemies.’

  ‘I’m not a sycophant, and I’m sure not an enemy,’ Ken stated.

  She gave him a fleeting, half-thawed smile. ‘Well, dear, we’ll see about that. At the moment you scarcely know me.’

  All the same, as she gently pushed him ahead of her through the door, he felt her hand linger on his back, caressing his muscles through his shirt. The ice-queen, complicated and regal as she was, appeared to be in heat.

  The bedroom was a huge vaulted hall that had been designed to make Adele’s last husband feel as if he were a Spanish nobleman relaxing after a hard day horsewhipping the grape-harvesters on his bodegdn. There was a carved four-poster bed, draped in white silk, as high and stately as an altar. The rugs were deep white shag-pile, and everywhere Ken looked, there were tall mirrors in gilded frames. Two grotesque hanging lamps of p
ierced brass suffused the room in soft yellow light.

  Through another archway, Ken could smell bath oils and steam. Adele said, ‘Let me see if Dolores has finished. She’s such a tartar, you know. She’d stand over us and scrub behind our ears if I let her.’

  Ken waited in the bedroom while Adele dealt with the maid. He carried out a quick reconnaissance of the top of the bureau, where there was a large colour photograph of Adele, ten or fifteen years younger, against a background of Swiss mountains; a small silver beauty-patch box; and a gold-and-tortoiseshell comb and brush set. Then he swiftly opened the bedside cabinets, and ran his eyes down fifteen or twenty paperbacks, a Dristan nasal spray, a box of tissues, and two crumpled tubes of K-Y.

  He stood up, and turned around, and as he did so all of his reflections in all of those mirrors turned around too, and gave him a heart-stopping shock. Then he looked back at himselves and grinned lopsidedly at his nervousness. Eighteen reflections grinned lopsidedly back.

  Adele came through from the bathroom, followed closely by the stern Dolores, who glared at Ken from beneath her unplucked eyebrows before going out and closing the door behind her with firm displeasure.

  Adele laughed. ‘You mustn’t let Dolores upset you. She’s reached the age when the only men she approves of are priests, and not all of them.’

  ‘How about you?’ Ken asked.

  It was a provocative question in all kinds of ways, and for the first time Adele sensed that Ken Irwin might not be as much of a hitchhiking hayseed as he made out. ‘I’m at an age when the only men I approve of are silent and sexual,’ she said.

  He peeled back his shirt, and dropped it on the floor. ‘Do you have a bathrobe?’ he asked her.

  ‘Do you really need one?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t want you to think that I’m immodest.’

  ‘Immodest? Where did you learn a word like that?’

  ‘Church.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re not in church now, so you needn’t worry about it. Now, unfasten my gown, will you?’

  He stepped up to her. Close to, she was fragrant with musk. He lifted her ash blonde hair at the back, and slowly pulled down the zipper of her dress, all the way down to the small of her back, and the swelling curves of her bottom. She turned around, and peeled the white satin away from her body like plastic shrink-wrapping off a fresh nectarine.