“My God,” I breathed, loosening my tie, sweating in the hothouse atmosphere where everything seemed overripe. I wanted to peel off my clothes—maybe that was the idea.
“Pleases the eyes, don’t it?” Twain said, looking about languidly as he settled on one of the divans. “I’d have no kick about this as a steady thing.”
I was about to say it would drive me crazy when a cultivated voice said, “Gentlemen.” We looked up. A stout woman enveloped in yards of lace and satin, ablaze with diamonds, regarded us regally. We rose and bent in turn over her jeweled fingers. All convivialities of her home, she assured me, were at my disposal.
“Since it’s manifest you prefer the finest company,” she said, beaming at Twain, “allow me to say that our young ladies are finely bred. You will enjoy their discourses.”
“I’m sure I will.” I eyed a Rubenesque young thing floating around a corner in a filmy gown.
“Precisely,” she said, and disappeared through the leaves of an enormous dieffenbachia, her departure not unlike, Twain remarked, a lit-up paddle wheeler forging through an overgrown channel.
“How much will these Rabelaisian delights cost us?” I asked.
“Cost you” he corrected. “I’m sworn to reform myself. Oh, the night could run sixty, seventy dollars, but for that you’d get all you could concoct—and more.”
“I’ll limit my concoctions.” I had at most fifty dollars left from my gambling winnings.
Twain bought drinks, smoked a cigar, and departed. I wasn’t alone very long. A red-haired woman appeared, plump and rouge-cheeked. Her name was Opal, she said, and asked if I would care for champagne.
“Well, I think I would.”
She smiled and suggested showing me the salon. “Do you enjoy Chopin?”
At a grand piano, playing a nocturne with effortless facility, sat a young woman with chestnut hair and pale eyes. She was wonderfully slender—doubtless viewed as a freak, I reflected—and her skin was flawless. She looked up at me. She smiled. I smiled back. Opal vanished discreetly. A waiter appeared with champagne and two glasses. The young woman finished playing.
“Thank you, kind sir.” She sipped from the fluted glass and studied me over the rim. “I am Charlotte.”
“I’m . . . impressed.”
She took my arm and guided me to a loveseat. She sat close, her hip brushing mine. Her eyes regarded me intently. Her voice was cultivated, devoid of the flat eastern accents I’d grown used to. She was careful to ask little about me. We talked of San Francisco and its weather, topics about which she seemed knowledgeable. She asked if I would like to chat in a cozier quarter of the mansion.
Her room was almost as lush as the parlor. A silk canopy overhung a huge bed swimming in folds of blue satin. In an alcove stood a sofa carved with arabesques. She led me to it.
“Do you enjoy Moliere?” She laughed delightedly at my expression. “I am reading Le Misanthrope. Do you know it?”
I tried to remember it from college. “Well . . .”
She lifted a volume from her table and read a passage aloud in fluent, musical French. “Alceste’s friend, Philinthe,” she translated, “tells him, ‘My mind is no more shocked at seeing a man a rogue . . . than seeing vultures eager for prey, mischievous apes, or fury-lashed wolves.’”
She spoke slowly. Her pale eyes stared into mine. In them I saw tiny reflections of a flickering gas jet on the wall behind me.
“Sam,” she said huskily, stroking my hand, “a gentleman needs to be a rogue on occasion.”
That did it. I pulled at her dress as she tore at my shirt, and things became like a movie passion montage—you know, naked bodies churning and tumbling and dissolving from one position to another. Charlotte knew her business and gave every appearance of liking it. Once when I thought I was hurting her—she was anything but a heavyweight—she hissed and clawed at me when I slackened.
I couldn’t get enough of her smooth flesh against mine. I pressed her hard, ran my hands over her, stroked and kneaded, took the warmth of her into me. Toward dawn, after the last climactic shudder, after the last glass of brandy, she held my head to her breasts and rocked me like an infant.
“Dear Sam,” she whispered, “you needed this terribly.”
A high sighing sound escaped me; she pressed me tighter.
“I haven’t felt like this since I was first married.”
She laughed gently and said, “I help many marriages.”
“I’ll bet. What about you? A beautiful woman who reads Moliere and plays Chopin. Why aren’t you out shopping the Ladies’ Mile, spending a rich husband’s money?”
She smiled faintly. “I was ruined for that life.”
“Ruined?”
“Seduced by a gentleman.”
“So?”
“You don’t understand? We were to marry. I let him have his way. Then he no longer wanted me.” She shrugged. “It occurs commonly.”
“And you’re ruined?”
“Why do you say it so? You know perfectly well no respectable man would have me.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.” She shrugged. “It all took place five years ago. I don’t look backward or carry regrets. I’ve saved my earnings. Someday I’ll have a mansion of my own.”
“Ruined, for God’s sake,” I muttered. “What a time to live!”
She kissed me. “Is there another?
Chapter 8
Central Park’s greenery glowed in the afternoon rays. Twain and I halted our carriage some distance from a gazebo where a band tuned noisily for the Sunday afternoon concert.
“You don’t look the worse for wear,”
