The Sweetman Curve Page 6

  Ken stood there, only a couple of feet away, and looked at her. Her figure was trim and curvy, and yet it had an unreality about it that reminded him of those inflatable vinyl women. Her breasts were high, hard and round, with nipples that stuck on top of them like cherries on a cake. Her stomach was flat, with no sign of sagging muscles. Her vulva was shaved like a child’s, which added to the unreality, and her pubic bone was as flat as if she had never given birth in her life. She was tanned all over, a gentle glowing tan that spoke of expensive sun preparations and long nude days by the pool.

  ‘You’re pretty amazing, aren’t you?’ he said, in a soft voice.

  She raised an eyebrow laconically.

  ‘What did you expect? Grandma Moses?’

  He smiled, and shrugged. She stepped up to him, and unfastened the big silver buckle of his belt. He didn’t know whether he wanted to be aroused or not, but he couldn’t help himself, and when she tugged down the metal zipper, and opened up his jeans, she had to prise out his erection with both hands.

  He stepped out of his pants. She held him close, one hand still clasping his stiffened penis. ‘Time for your bath, little boy,’ she whispered in his ear.

  Naked, they walked through to the bathroom. The tub itself was dark blue enamel with gold-plated faucets in the shape of leaping dolphins. The walls were mirrored in gold-veined glass, and there were plants hanging everywhere, in baskets and woven rope planters.

  Adele stepped down into the foam, and then swirled around and held out her hand for him. He went in, cautious and apparently shy, but then she pulled him in, and he splashed up to his neck in perfumed water, breathless and spluttering.

  ‘I’m going to soap you,’ she said, kissing his nose. ‘So you’d better stand up.’

  ‘Anything’s better than drowning, ma’am,’ he told her. When he said ‘ma’am’ she gave him a quick, intense glance, but he stood up then, his muscular body slick with water, and she decided to leave any doubts and questions until later.

  She stood up beside him, and began to lather his shoulders with strawberry and glycerine soap. She kissed and bit his lips, and then pushed her wet tongue into his mouth, and licked his teeth. He felt her caressing, sudsing hands rub down his back, and around his buttocks. Then she soaped his chest, and his stomach, and worked her way down to his pubic hair and his red, rigid erection.

  Kneeling, she stroked his tight scrotum with soapy hands, and then worked her fingers in slippery strokes up the shaft of his penis. He groaned, even though he didn’t want to, even though he believed he didn’t care, and didn’t want to get involved.

  Just when he felt a feeling between his thighs like mercury rising in a heatwave thermometer, she let him go, and curled herself back in the tub, her eyes mocking and erotic.

  ‘Come on,’ she teased him, ‘rinse yourself off. Then you can soap me.’

  He knelt down, unsmiling, and took a sponge from a basket beside the bath to squeeze water over his shoulders and back. Then he picked up the soap, and rubbed it between his hands until it worked up a rich lather.

  Adele again stood up, and gently rested her hands on his shoulders.

  ‘You’re a very beautiful boy,’ she said carefully, looking down at him. ‘You’re almost too beautiful to have come from Montana.’

  He reached up and began to soap her stomach and her back. Her skin felt much younger than he had imagined it would. It was almost like caressing a teenage girl. His fingers ran down her sides, around her thighs, and she shuddered with pleasure.

  ‘Some pretty good-looking folks come from Montana,’ he told her. ‘Evel Knievel for one.’

  ‘He’s a biker,’ she said. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘When I’m not being a male domestic?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He stood up, and took her breasts in both his hands, and soaped them until the nipples stood tight and stiff.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m an obliging kind of guy, I guess. I’ll do anything.’

  She opened her brown eyes wide. ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, but you are.’

  He kissed her. ‘Does that feel like a lie?’ he said, in a warm, husky voice.

  Her eyes were still wide. ‘All kisses are lies. People only kiss when they don’t want to bother to show how they really feel.’

  He soaped her back, and ran his fingertips down the cleft of her bottom and between her legs. He touched the smooth lips of her vulva, and then parted them with one hand, a magician opening an orange, so that he could slide his middle finger up her.

  She clung to him, her arms around his waist. His finger worked deeper, caressing her inner folds. She said ‘Ohhh…’ under her breath. Her firm breasts, slippery as pet seals, pressed against him.

  Suddenly, she reached down and held his wrist. His eyes, which had been almost closed, opened. There was that calculating smile on her face again. A smile unsettled by her feelings of passion, but still tinged with frost.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.

  She lowered her eyelashes. ‘You are,’ she whispered. There was an uneasy silence. ‘Well. What makes you say a thing like that?’ he asked her nervously.

  She lifted her face up to him and kissed him with open lips. ‘I want all of you,’ she said. ‘Not just one finger of one hand. I want to see you shiver, and suffer. I want to ride you into the ground.’

  She stepped out of the tub, wet, and held out her hand. ‘Come on,’ she told him. He paused for a moment, and then silently climbed out after her.

  They didn’t say a single word as they went back into the bedroom. Ken sat on the edge of the bed, and all around him, eighteen reflections sat on the edge of the bed, too. Adele pushed him back on to the white silk cover, and he could feel it sticking to his wet body. Then she climbed astride him, and took his erection in her small fist.

  ‘Isn’t this what you wanted?’ she said. ‘Isn’t this why you waited by the roadside so long?’

  ‘You think I was waiting for you?’

  She watched his face for a while. ‘I’m not certain,’ she said. ‘But it all seems to be too wonderfully good to be true. You look too much like Roger and Janoscz and Harry and Mike all mixed up together.’

  ‘Maybe you’re seeing ghosts,’ he told her.

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she carefully guided his erection up between her slender thighs mantling the swollen head of it with her parted lips. Their eyes were locked in a curious encounter that didn’t seem to have much to do with affection or human friendship, but more to do with the rising cold excitement of mutual fear. But then she slowly sat on him, sensually rotating her hips, until he was as far up inside her body as it was possible for him to reach. She was almost as tight as a virgin, and he knew that her surgeons must have been practising their art in unseen places, too.

  She leaned forward, and kissed his face all over. His eyes, his cheeks, his forehead, his mouth. Her breath came in tight, controlled gasps.

  ‘You’re very honoured,’ she murmured. ‘You’re now fornicating with the greatest screen actress of the century, with the possible exception of Garbo.’

  He didn’t say anything for a while, didn’t even move, although his penis involuntarily flinched inside her.

  ‘Garbo was nothing on you,’ he told her throatily. ‘Nothing at all.’

  She began to move up and down on him, as if she were elegantly riding bareback on some well-broken stallion. Her eyes closed, and he couldn’t even guess what he saw behind her eyelids. Her movements were supple, and she lifted herself so high with each upward stroke that she almost lost him, but she kept him there just, and gave him a little squeeze with the ring of muscle around her vagina. He began to feel waves of heat through his body, and a growing tension that he could not control.

  She rose up and down faster, and deeper, and more savagely. Her long fingernails gripped the muscles of his stomach until he winced. She leaned forward again and bit at his neck and his face and his nipples, unti
l he cried out. Then, as her body rippled with the first waves of her first orgasm, she seized his hair and twisted and wrenched it until the tears started in his eyes.

  There was a moment when it seemed that the world had gone. A suspended moment of everything and nothing, like a house about to fall off the edge of a cliff, a hand about to wave, a bomb about to explode, a mouth just opening to speak.

  Then he felt himself go and she screamed and screamed out loud, the scream of a woman of fifty-nine, and her body shook as if she were going to fall apart.

  He had never seen anything like it. She lay on her own on the white silk bedspread, shifting and twisting and crying out, having orgasm after orgasm, long after he had sat up, and then stood up, and gone to empty the tub and take a shower. He came back in from the bathroom to watch her, and as he stood there the mirrors in the room made it look as if he had been painted eighteen times that afternoon by El Greco.

  Eventually, she lay silent and still.

  He said, ‘Are you okay?’

  She nodded.

  He came around and sat on the edge of the bed. Her face was beaded with perspiration. She smiled at him, and affectionately held his wrist.

  ‘I have to call my agency in San Bernardino,’ he told her.

  ‘At this time of night?’

  ‘It’s twenty-four-hour.’

  She bent her head across and kissed his hand. ‘I don’t trust you one bit,’ she told him. ‘You seem like a boy with – what can I call them? Ulterior motives.’

  ‘Ulterior motives? What kind of ulterior motives?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I sense them.’

  He coughed, and said, ‘I’d like to eat soon, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Of course. The cook will be making dinner now. You like saddle of lamb?’

  He stood up, and scratched his scalp. ‘Do you have some pants?’

  ‘Pants? Sure. How do you like them cooked?’

  He turned to look at her, ready to smile. But Adele wasn’t smiling at all. She had been through too much betrayal and too many husbands to fail to recognise what men were and what men weren’t. Even if Ken Irwin really was an obliging stud and a carefree male domestic from Butte, Montana, he was something else as well. Something unusual, unsuspected, and possibly dangerous.

  She said, ‘You can borrow Roger’s tuxedo. We always dress for dinner here. I suppose you could call it a last vestige of civilisation.’

  *

  Before dinner, in Roger’s one-time dressing-room, sitting at a desk that was clustered with photographs of Adele’s mother and late father, Ken Irwin made his phone call to San Bernardino.

  The phone rang for a long time before it was picked up, and even then there was almost a minute’s silence. Ken said: ‘T.F.?’

  A voice answered, ‘Hi, Ken.’

  ‘T.F., I’m in. She’s a touch wary, but nothing to sweat about.’

  More silence. Then the voice said, ‘Okay, I’ll meet you. Same time, same place we talked about.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Ken. ‘Any news from you-know-who?’

  ‘Nothing so far.’

  ‘Good. I’ll keep in touch.’

  The phone at the other end was set down, and Ken heard nothing but a long, continuous tone. He laid down his own receiver, and then stood up. Adele was standing in the doorway.

  ‘Did you make your call?’ she asked him.

  ‘Sure thing. They said it was okay if I ducked out of those jobs. They have another guy to fill in.’

  Adele looked at him, coldly but sweetly, with an expression like sugary grapefruit sorbet. ‘I’m sure nobody fills in as magnificently as you do,’ she said. ‘Now, come eat your dinner. You want to keep your precious strength up, don’t you?’

  Eight

  A warm salty wind was blowing in off the Atlantic, and the palms along Miami Beach rustled and tossed. It was eight o’clock on Saturday morning, the most unsettled time of day, and the pale sun was sliding between layers of low-lying cloud. A flock of seagulls wheeled and screamed in the shallow surf.

  On the flat rooftop of the Doral Hotel gymnasium, in his purple and yellow Bermuda shorts and his old blue undershirt with CXC embroidered on the breast, Carl X. Chapman was jogging around and around with solitary doggedness. This was what he called his ‘dice-shaking hour’ – the time when he could juggle around in his mind all the day’s upcoming problems and pressures, uninterrupted by his aides, his secretaries, his telephones, his teleprinters, or even his wife. ‘I need an hour in the morning to shake those dice the same way other folks need bacon and eggs,’ he used to say, too frequently for most of his friends to laugh.

  He was a heavy, paunchy man with steel grey hair and a broad, rough face that reminded people of the blunt-speaking, self-made politicians of the Thirties. People said he had somewhat of a fatherly personality, the kind of father who puts his arm around you and tells you to hand half of your candy to your friend, because friendship is greater than all the candy in the world; and you’d hate yourself for loving him so much that you actually did what he said.

  It was his paternal manner that had won Carl X. Chapman his second term as Republican Senator from Minnesota. He seemed to be everywhere at once, joking and chiding in his deep, gravelly voice. He seemed to know all of the problems that worried his supporters the most, and when he sat down next to a farmer or a housewife or a factory worker, he could drink beer from the can and eat chicken out of the box, and make them feel that he was prepared to dedicate the whole of the rest of his life to solving their personal anxieties.

  His Republican admirers back in Minneapolis-St Paul thought that Carl X. Chapman was the closest they had ever had to a private visit from God. They came up and shook his hand in the street. They sent his family gifts at Christmas. They worshipped him with such fervour that one sarcastic political columnist had asked when he was going to walk on the waters of Lake Minnetonka, and feed the entire population of St Paul Park (five thousand five hundred) on two Mounds bars and a pack of Hamburger Helper.

  Carl X. Chapman didn’t enjoy sarcastic criticism. In fact, he didn’t enjoy any kind of criticism at all. In his view, what he was doing was above judgement, because his cause was the American dream, for every one of those Americans who had earned it. He saw himself as a huge, rugged patriotic figure, under whose stern but kindly eye the people of America would re-learn their very first principles: work and prayer.

  He could handle criticism, of course, and although he rarely spoke about it, that was what made him a politician with staying-power as well as popularity. In Washington, he was known as a hard, dirty fighter, and Rolling Stone had remarked of his last electoral campaign that ‘he heaped so many complex charges of bribery, infamy, hanky-panky and plain old jiggery-pokery on his adversary’s head that some voters began to ask if a man who knew so much about all these underhand practises might not conceivably have employed some of them himself.’

  But Carl X. Chapman believed in hitting his opponents first, and hitting them so damned hard that they didn’t even finish round one. As he jogged around on the roof of his Miami hotel, he occasionally tried a flat-footed Ali shuffle, and shadow-boxed the morning wind. A left, and a right, and a jab in the kidneys.

  He had turned sixty-six in May, and he liked to keep himself fit. His father had been allergic to almost everything, including horsehair and shellfish, and his mother had died of pleurisy when he was eight. He had spent a sad, shy childhood in a rundown side-street in Rochester, Minnesota, not far from St Mary’s Park, and his father had worked as assistant manager in the Kress dime store. In his mind’s eye, he could still see his father arriving home every evening after a ten-hour day, grey-faced and narrow-chested, hanging up his derby on the cheap varnished hall stand. He could picture his mother, too, in the days before she died, her face as pale as soap on the pillow. He still couldn’t stand the smell of menthol, because it always brought back the lingering fumes of Leininger’s formaldehyde-and-menthol inhalers, which his
mother swore to God, right up until the morning she died, had saved her life.

  But what stuck sharpest in his mind was the day he had walked nine blocks to the dime store to bring his father his eyeglasses, which he had left behind on the mantelpiece. Carl had wandered around the vast, crowded emporium, stacked floor-to-ceiling with mops and zinc pails and vegetable racks, its counters piled with cheap glittering jewellery and candies and notebooks with multi-coloured pages and combs and plastic ornaments and garish towels so thin and threadbare he wondered how anyone could get dry on them; and at last, in an alcove where they sold locks and doorknobs and latches, he found his father weeping.

  He had never known why, and he had never asked. He had simply handed over the eyeglasses, and run home. But when he grew older, he vowed that the world would never make him hide in a corner, and weep. No bastard was ever going to grind him down, no bastard on earth.

  He punched at the wind again. A hard left to his father’s memory. A harder right to all the creeps and morons who had laid his father so low. His father had done Carl one favour that was beyond price, and that was to put him through college. As a student, he had been awkward and touchy and aggressive; but he was lucky enough to come into contact with an equally belligerent tutor, an Irishman, who butted heads with him hard enough and often enough to make him understand that, without an education, aggression was wasted. He had graduated with honours – one of the toughest, brightest young Republicans around, and by the age of twenty-six, in a pinstriped suit with a vest to match and a well-brushed derby hat, he was elected one of Minnesota’s youngest-ever senators.

  He found support for his dream of a hard-working America from industrialists and banks and giant corporations, and during the Republican sweep of 1946, heavily financed and supported by Horace Ossenbacker of Ossenbacker Steel, he was returned to the Eightieth Congress, fierce, youthful, splenetic, and raring to make his mark.