with his tongue until her teeth opened and her breath came fast; felt her breasts against him, the hardened nipples coming moist. Her face was close, so that her two eyes blurred into one, and a pleasant warmth flowed through him; he became quietly attentive to the gentle searching touch of his own hands, the heat of her pulse-driven breath in his mouth, the hardness of her teeth against his flicking tongue. He cupped her buttocks and rolled her against him, his penis sliding hard and slow into her snug sheath; he massaged her back with long lazy strokes of his fingernails. A fire came leaping in him; they lunged and surged with driving abandon, flesh blending tight, until their pounding pulsebeats seemed to thunder together in a single roar: they became a single creature of ecstatic wheeling frenzy, fused and thrashing, flesh tingling in sensuous delirium, possessed by lusty animal joy that climbed with humid moans to the helpless, strained agonized cry of climax.
And then she was curled up with fists together against his chest, one knee hooked over his waist, snuggling close, soft and content; she yawned luxuriously and nuzzled his throat. He could faintly see the soft whiteness of her breasts, caught between her arms; he felt the light touch of her fingers against his chest, and he didn’t want to think beyond this bed, this moment, her. He felt tranquil and at ease.
But soon she stirred and rolled away from him and stood up beside the bed.
He said, “Stay the night.”
“No, dahling. I must hurry home before it turns into a pumpkin.”
“Why?”
“Because, dearest Russ, we mustn’t let this mean more than it should, and if I slept the night in your bed it would put thoughts in your head. I bear you fond affection, dahling, and you are superb in the sack, but I’m afraid I am not strong enough to encourage things I have no intention of carrying through to a finish. Strong, that is, in the sense that a skunk is a strong animal. I couldn’t do that to you, and I won’t let you do it to me. I know both of us too well. So let’s leave it at the cliche of two ships passing in the night, shall we? The message has been exchanged to our mutual delight, and now we both go on to sail our own courses. Oh, shit, what a poet I’d make! Wouldn’t I have made a hell of a truck driver, though?”
She leaned over him, pecked him on the cheek, and trailed her fingers along his ribs, and said, “Chalk it up to education, dahling. Initiation rites. Feel free henceforth to join the hit-and-run fraternity of swinging singles. No, don’t say anything-we simply inhabit different worlds, my deah. From time to time when I happen to be passing through yours, maybe I’ll drop by. Between times, be thankful I didn’t decide to stay.”
And so he watched her leave, before he slept.
25. Howard Claiborne
Howard Claiborne walked down Wall Street without hurry; these great monolithic buildings gave him comfort-there was in them certainty, permanence, solidity. The old man had a keen appreciation of his life. He enjoyed the tight-knit efficient organization of his financial empire in the fuzzy world of modern bureaucracy. He enjoyed the daily luncheons in plush private dining clubs with pre-Castro Havana cigars and silverware crested with coats of arms. He enjoyed his exclusive multifold membership in the highest-priced club in the world, the New York Stock Exchange, each of whose 1,366 seats was worth more than half a million dollars.
The big bullpen on the eighth floor was half-empty when he strode across it; he had arrived, as always, ten minutes ahead of time. His secretary was in place behind the wooden railing: “Good morning, Mr. Claiborne!” Miss Goralski chirped. He nodded his head once, smiling with reserve, and touched the flower in his buttonhole as he entered his baroquely ornamented office and tore off the page of the desk calendar to expose today’s, Thursday’s, date. His big corner office was dominated by a huge walnut desk, behind which he settled in a chair which had been occupied by his father before him.
Howard Claiborne’s parents had wanted a polite, neat, unintrusive child. He had grown up in the requisite prep school (Exeter) and summer camp, trained not to display emotion; even love, to a Claiborne, was polite.
On a chain across his conservative waistcoat he carried his Phi Beta Kappa key and his Skull and Bones doodad. He had the requisite membership cards in his wallet-the Union League, the Links. He lived, during the summer months, in a turreted gingerbread Victorian estate on Fishers Island, from which he commuted each day by helicopter. During the winter, while his wife-often with one or another grandchild-went to Florida or the Bahamas, he occupied a plush townhouse with spiral staircase, another legacy of his father. Howard Claiborne’s great grandfather had been a buccaneering magnate who had used the bodies of workmen for railroad ties. His son, Howard Claiborne’s grandfather, had used his inherited wealth to establish himself on Wall Street and in the best drawing rooms. It was said that if a family started with money, it would take at least three generations to get into the best society. Howard Claiborne was the fourth generation: a bulwark, a patriarch, a Brahmin. There were perhaps a dozen Claibornes in the New York telephone directories, but only one family was meant when the phrase was uttered, “the Claibornes, of New York and Fishers Island.”
This Thursday morning, Howard Claiborne occupied the first half-hour of his working day by reading the correspondence that had accumulated overnight. He was near the bottom of the stack when the phone buzzed and he lifted it to his ear.
“Mr. Arthur Rademacher, of Melbard Chemical.”
“Fine, Miss Goralski. Put him on.”
There followed a fifteen-minute conversation, during which the expression on Howard Claiborne’s patrician face, and the intonations of his voice, underwent far vaster changes than was his usual wont. Afterward he sat back in the old chair with his eyes shut and his fingers drumming on the desk-a sign, with Howard Claiborne, of spectacular disturbance.
He went into the file room and unlocked the Wakeman Fund drawer and spent half an hour there; he could have had Miss Goralski bring the files to him, but somehow it seemed necessary to do this privately, with no one’s outside knowledge. And finally, when he returned to his desk, he buzzed Miss Goralski and said, “Is Mr. Wyatt at his desk?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ask him to come in here, please.”
The young man, Claiborne thought, had a supercilious air. That would soon change, he thought-and abruptly chastised himself for feeling a moment’s anticipatory vindictive pleasure in the thought. Steve had taken a seat without being asked and was sitting with his legs carelessly crossed, one arm flung over the back of the stuffed leather chair.
The old man said, in his customary unruffled murmur, “Tell me something. Would you feel happier working for a hedge fund?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“The Wakeman Fund, which you manage, is a closed-end mutual fund. You are supposed to take prudent risks-prudent- with a view toward long-term investment gains. You’ve been juggling it like a hedge fund. I told you several months ago I wouldn’t tolerate the kind of supercharged financial gunslinging that goes on elsewhere in the Street. A hedge fund, if I need to stir your memory, is a high-risk speculation designed to move large blocks of capital in and out more rapidly than any other kind of investment operation. The little fellows like them because they generate brokers’ commissions. The manager hedges by selling short and thereby making money in both directions, knowing that whatever the overall day’s average may be, some stocks are rising and some are falling. The hedge manager leverages his buying power by margin-buying and factoring his assets. He deals in highly volatile issues of the sort an old-line partnership like Bierce, Claiborne amp; Myers has a reputation for avoiding like the plague, out of consideration for the financial stability and security of our investors. Hedge funds can make huge sums of money in very short periods of time-but the risk of sudden loss is as great as the chance of sudden profit. Does all this sound familiar to you? It should. It describes pretty well the way you’ve been operating the assets of the Wakeman Fund for the past few weeks. And so, my callow young cousin, I repeat the initial question: Would you feel happier working for a hedge fund?”
The flip mask had drained from Steve’s face; he looked sullen. “I’ve been doing my best, sir, according to my own judgment, and I’ll remind you I’ve broken every gain record in the history of the fund. I thought you’d be pleased, sir, but if-”
“Twaddle,” Claiborne said. “I suspect if I audited your books right now you’d be found short on securities and
