LITMIR.BIZ

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What exactly he means by that you know.

      “Are you saying your cousin can’t be trusted?” I ask.

      “I’m just saying he can be a little direct. Army guy.”

      “Is this something to do with last night? When you went out?”

      Frank pauses. “What do you mean by that?”

      “I mean, did something happen last night that made you think he couldn’t be trusted with women? You said, in the bedroom just now, you said that you could always tell about a man, on a night out.”

      I don’t know quite what I’m fishing for. From the look on Frank’s face, which has shifted from concern to wariness, he has a better idea than I do.

      “Look,” he says. “He’s a bachelor. Red-blooded. You can read all you want between the lines of that. I just want to make sure he was a gentleman.”

      I smile. “Darling, I was just making a little joke back there. I guess I need to work on my delivery. If Pepper had said the same thing—I’ll say—you’d have thought she was just flirting.”

      His brow flattens out, his smile returns. “All right, all right. I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

      “I’m more than okay. Perfectly capable of fending off ungentlemanly behavior at cocktails.”

      “I know you are. My perfectly capable wife.”

      I reach up and brush his lapel with my thumb. “Don’t worry about me. I won’t let you down.”

      He kisses the thumb and pats my behind. “You never do. Now go spread some of that charm around.”

      Over his shoulder, from the additional height of my two-inch heels, I see a familiar face part from the crowd and turn in our direction. The words bachelor and red-blooded float in my head. Read between the lines, Frank said, whatever that meant. And I think I do. I think I do know what that means. After all, Caspian is a bachelor, isn’t he? An attractive red-blooded bachelor, strong and scarred and so on, tall and wounded, the kind that women hang all over at nightclubs and cocktail parties.

      Well, who can blame them? Here I am, a wife and hostess, a straight young pillar of society, and my face warms right up when Caspian turns to me. My blood rises obediently under the touch of Caspian’s attention.

      I wrap my empty hand—the left hand, crowned by a triumphant engagement ring and wedding band—around the back of Frank’s neck. I pull him down for a lingering kiss.

      He lifts his mouth away, bemused. “What was that for?”

      “For calling me charming.” I press the tender crease of his lips with the index finger of my right hand, the hand holding the martini.

      The vodka hits fast and hard. I step outside for a breath of the fresh stuff, and nearly stumble over Kitty, Constance’s daughter, who sits cross-legged on the terrace, staring at the wall.

      I catch her shoulder just in time. “Oh, I’m sorry, darling. Are you okay?”

      “Yes.” Her arms are crossed.

      I bend down next to her. “Why aren’t you over by the pool, with the other kids?”

      She shakes her head.

      “Would you like me to get Mommy for you?”

      She presses her lips together and shakes her head again.

      “Okay, then.” I ease myself down next to her on the stones, careful not to snag my stockings. “We’ll just sit here.”

      We stare companionably at the beach, where the seagulls seem to have found an object of dispute, some rotting marine carcass or another. The air fills with acrid squawks. Vicious things, seagulls. I wiggle my toes inside my satin shoes and wonder if I could possibly take them off. (The shoes, not the toes.)

      “What’s that smell?” says Kitty.

      I cup my hands over my mouth and puff out a breath. “It’s my martini, I think.”

      “It’s yucky.”

      “Yes. Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

      “Then why do you drink them?”

      “Oh, it’s just what grown-ups do, I guess. We do a lot of silly things. Maybe we just wish we were still kids, like you.”

      She chews on this for a moment. “Mommy drinks martinis.”

      “Does she?”

      “She drinks them in the nighttime. Then she takes her pills and sometimes she gets mad at Daddy.” She says this in the same matter-of-fact way she might describe a game of marbles with her cousins.

      “How do you know this, honey? Shouldn’t you be in bed at nighttime?”

      “Sometimes I need a glass of water.”

      I draw an invisible circle on the stone next to my foot and think of Mums and Daddy, sometimes getting along and sometimes not, lubricating the Fifth Avenue evenings with vodka and courtesy. “Well, you know. Grown-ups fight sometimes.”

      “One time they took off their clothes and Mommy kissed Daddy’s wee-wee.”

      I open my mouth and nothing comes out.

      “Nancy wouldn’t let me play with her horse.” She starts to cry.

      “Oh, honey. Is that why you’re sitting here, all by yourself?”

      Sniff. “Yes. She said I couldn’t play with it because I had germs.”

      “We all have germs. It’s okay.”

      “Do you have germs?”

      “Yes. We all do. I think Nancy just didn’t want to share her horse.”

      “That’s not very nice.”

      “No, it isn’t.” I rise on my knees and take her hand. “Let’s go over to the pool with the other kids, and I’ll tell Nancy she has to share her toys with her cousins.”

      “Okay.” She jumps up and tows me along the terrace at a skip. The afternoon sun lights her hair like a nimbus. “It’s a white horse with black dots on its bottom.”

      “An Appaloosa.”

      She swings our linked hands. “Sometimes Daddy kisses Mommy’s pagina.”

      “Her what?”

      Kitty chants, “Boys have penises, girls have paginas.”

      “Oh. Vagina, honey. With a V.”

      “Vagina, vagina!” she shouts, all the way to the pool, while I try to shush her. Probably not hard enough.

      When I return to the party, fully refreshed, Pepper has just descended the stairs in splendor, her bosom not quite overflowing from an iced violet dress cut on an extremely expensive bias that ends a good four inches above her knees. She looks even more delicious than usual.

      Delicious, that’s the word for Pepper. If I were a man, I’d want to gobble her up and lick my chops afterward. Nature’s just devious that way, giving Pepper all the sex appeal, as if to lock us in our preordained places and watch, breathless, to see if we can break loose.

      To the Hardcastles, Pepper is a rare dish, never before seen at the table. This is my younger sister Pepper, I say, by way of introduction, presenting her with garnish.

      Why do they call you Pepper? the men usually ask.

      She usually winks. Because I’m that bad.

      As a rule, the women don’t see the satirical curve of her lip when she says this, and they harden up instantly into those frozen polite expressions you get when a wind-and-surf clan of females like the Hardcastles—no makeup, horsey

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