Graham Masterton - Plague

There was a short silence. Esmeralda looked at him over the rim of her glass.

'My optimism?' she said. 'Or my body?'

Ivor grunted in amusement. 'I guess it's both. Seems like, these days, I've had more of the former than the latter.'

'Are you saying that man cannot live by optimism alone?'

'I don't want to force you. I don't want to make you feel obliged.'

She gave him a calm, almost supercilious smile. 'No man ever could. You know that.'

'I hope so,' he said, crossing his legs. 'I mean, the gallery, and this place — you mustn't feel you have to pay me back.'

She didn't look up. She was twisting a gold and cornelian ring around her finger. 'I feel grateful,' she said. 'You can never stop me feeling that. You know, I looked around the gallery today, and it's so perfect, and it's all because of you. You're a very beautiful man, pa. I mean that.'

He pulled a face. 'Your mother didn't think so.'

'My mother didn't know shit from sauerkraut.'

He laughed, despite himself. 'Don't say that. That's my former wife you're talking about.'

Esmeralda stood up, and walked around the apartment with her bluey-green train floating around her. She wore gold rings on her toes, which Ivor always thought was incredibly erotic.

'Do you think this place is too sombre?' she asked.

He looked around. The sitting-room was decorated in creams and grape colors, with muted abstract paintings on the two inner walls. The furniture was all mirrors and maple.

'It has to be sombre,' he said. 'When you pay $185,000 for seven rooms, and $ 1,100 a month carrying charges — that's sombre.'

She came over and looked at him. Then she knelt down beside his chair, holding her brandy in one hand, and stroked the back of his wrist with one finger. He looked back at her, expressionless, seeking some kind of emotional flicker. She smiled.

'I'd like to say thank you,' she said softly.

'You don't have to.'

'But I would.'

She took his hand, and stood up. 'Come on,' she said, tugging him.

He thought for a moment. Then, without a word, he laid down his drink, and followed her. They walked across the soft, silent carpet to the main bedroom.

On the wide, tapestry-covered bed, she sat him down and undressed him. First his shoes, then his short black silk socks. He started to loosen his own necktie, but she wouldn't let him, and picked at the knot herself with her long dark-red fingernails.

Soon he was naked. His body was white and plump. There was gray wiry hair around his nipples, and his legs were thin and stick-like. He lay there, bald and old and unprepossessing, with his eyes closed. He knew what he looked like, but he also knew that when his eyes were shut, and the reality of age and unfitness were blocked out, there was a warm world of fantasy waiting that was more than nourished by Esmeralda's arousing treats.

Like a great blue-green moth, she mounted him. Her hand sought his hardened penis, and guided it up between her wide-parted thighs. She eased herself back on him, and she sighed a distant, muted sigh, as strange as the cry of some satisfied bird. Ivor kept his eyes tight shut, and said nothing.

Time passed. The apartment was quiet, except for the smooth rustle of Esmeralda's negligee, and their tense and excited breathing. Then Esmeralda started to tremble and shake. She sat in her stepfather's lap with her hands clenched tight against her breasts, feeling the deep, dark ripples of her own orgasm.

They lay side by side in silence for nearly half-an-hour. Ivor felt himself drifting into a curious sleep, and awoke after five minutes with a headache, and a metallic taste in his mouth. He sat up, and reached for his black silk bathrobe.

Esmeralda, her negligee spread romantically around her, opened her dark eyes and grinned.

'We're a strange pair, you and I,' she said, as Ivor walked across to the mirror.

He raised his head and examined her for a few moments in the glass. Somehow, she seemed less beautiful when her face was transposed by a mirror. But that didn't make him love her any the less. He loved her more than any possession he had ever had. Almost as much as his work, and far more than her mother. To fuck a daughter after fucking her mother is like buying your first new car, after you've had second-hand models all your life.

He brushed his few curls flat, splashed on some aftershave, and turned back to his stepdaughter with a serious face.

'I guess we are. Strange, I mean. Sometimes I can't believe it's really happening.'

'Isn't that the way with everything wonderful?'

Ivor nodded. 'It is. But it's the same with terrible things, too. When something truly terrible happens, you can never believe it's for real. You keep smacking yourself and hoping that you'll wake up.'

Esmeralda stretched luxuriously. 'Pa,' she said. 'What in the whole world could possibly happen to us that's terrible?'

On the floor above, in apartment 110, a tall man of sixty years old sat in a large Victorian spoonback chair, in almost total darkness. The heavy drapes were drawn over the windows, and the condominium was rank with cigarette smoke. The man had a handsome but heavily-wrinkled face, a white mane of leonine hair, and he was dressed in a light blue nylon jersey jumpsuit that was absurdly young for his age. He held his cigarette in a long ivory holder, and the ribbon of blue smoke rose rapidly up to the ceiling.

He had been watching home movies. An expensive projector on the small inlaid table beside him had just run through, and the stray end of the film was still flicking against the spool. On the far wall of the sitting-room was a blank movie screen — an incongruously modern intrusion in an apartment that was crowded with antiques.

The man seemed to be paralyzed, or frozen. His eyes were focused into some remote distance, and he let his cigarette burn away without lifting it once to his lips. His name was Herbert Gaines, and he had once been Hollywood's hottest new property.

If you ever saw The Romantics or Incident at Vicksburg, you'd remember the face. Or at least a smoother and younger version of it — a version that remained confident, and open, and bright. Herbert Gaines had just been watching that face, and those movies, for the thousandth time. It no longer hurt, but on the other hand it no longer anaesthetized the present, either.

The door from the bedroom opened, and a diagonal slice of light lit up the ageing actor, in his antique chair, like a movie spot. A young man of twenty-two, with denim shorts and bare feet, his chest decorated with tattoos of eagles, came padding into the sitting-room. He was drying his short-cropped hair with a yellow towel.

The young man looked at the blank screen. 'Have you finished sulking yet?' he asked. 'Or are you going to watch the other one as well?'

Herbert Gaines didn't answer, but there was a subtle change in his expression. His attention was no longer fixed on the faded memories of 1936, but on the present, and on the careless intrusion of his lover, Nicholas.

The young man came and stood between Gaines and the blank screen. A rectangle of white light illuminated his tight denim shorts, with their suggestive bulge, and the fine plume of hair that curled over the top of them. Herbert Gaines dosed his eyes.

'I don't know why you're sulking,' said Nicholas. 'I never said anything unpleasant.'

Gaines opened his eyes again. He reached over and switched off the projector, and as he did so, a long column of ash fell on the pale blue jumpsuit.

'You're so sensitive,' Nicholas went on. 'This is supposed to be an open, man-to-man relationship. Least, that's what you called it when it first began. But all we do these days is argue, and fight, and then you go off in a sulk and play those terrible old movies of yours.'