Occasionally Marcus came out to Greenwich. He visited the house only rarely, more often walking up from the railroad station to Amanda’s apartment and studio, where Cindy came and joined the two of them. They went to lunch. Three times Cindy and Marcus returned from lunch to spend an hour or so in Amanda’s bedroom. Much more often, Cindy took the train to the city, spent time at VKP Galleries, routinely had lunch with Marcus, often with Dietz or an artist joining them, then sometimes spent a midafternoon hour in Marcus’s apartment.

  It was all but inconceivable, Cindy told herself, that a woman married to Angelo Perino could give herself to Marcus Lincicombe. Angelo was everything that Marcus was not. Except that Angelo was absent too often. Marcus was there. He had time. He took time.

  He rarely saw her children, but he asked about them, and he was patient with her stories of their sayings and doings. He convinced her he was interested—and maybe he was. He was poised in the presence of Angelo and tried to ask him cogent but nonprying questions about XB.

  Cindy’s only objection to him was his ever-present pipe. When they were in a place where he could light up, she asked him to brush his teeth before they drew close together. The stink of his tobacco clung to his clothes and even to his skin. Only after they had showered was he free of it.

  He was an ingratiating lover. He seemed to wonder if he were capable of satisfying, and labored to prove he could—prove to himself perhaps as much as to her. Though he was a small man, he was well hung. He was knowledgeable. He mounted her like a stallion, but he made small adjustments in his posture and hers, to penetrate as deeply as possible and vary the sensations as much as he could.

  Because she had stopped taking the pill, they used condoms.

  3

  In the fall of 1985 the restyled Stallion was delivered to the dealers. It was lower. It was sleeker. Cindy did not protest having to drive one for a few weeks. It was a little more powerful than the earlier model. Virtually every one sold was air-conditioned, and it needed more power to run the compressor without needing downshifting on hills. It was an immediate success.

  Trade publications and even general-interest magazines ran articles on the plant in which the Stallion was built. Dealers reported that some buyers at least were attracted to the car because they had heard it was built to high quality standards in the most modern of automated factories.

  The new Stallion was also called another major success for Angelo Perino.

  1986

  4

  Everyone who knew thirteen-year-old John Perino called him a handsome boy because he was tall and muscular, with dark hair and dark eyes. He played lacrosse and tennis and had already won ribbons and a trophy for swimming. Girls took an interest in him, and he was beginning to receive telephone calls, some of which would drag out for an hour as a girl or several girls giggled on the other end of the line. He received invitations to parties. Some of the parties turned out to be kissing parties.

  Sondra Mead was fifteen in the spring, and her parents promised her a grown-up birthday party—a party where parents would not be present to supervise. They exacted a promise that the kids would not drink, but apart from that they were free to party as they wished.

  The Meads lived on an estate. They had converted a fieldstone building that had once been a carriage house into a party house. Sondra’s parents used it for that purpose themselves. It had a pool table and a Ping-Pong table, as well as a table with a roulette wheel and a bar that could be locked.

  Sondra, who was usually called Buffy, invited John Perino to her party. He was not her date; she invited several other boys; but when he accepted her invitation, she announced her triumph to her classmates at Greenwich Academy—

  “Guess who’s coming! John Perino!?

  “Oooh!”

  The party began at seven. Cindy intended to stop by at ten to drive John home, but Sondra’s mother said she was driving another teenager home who lived near the Perinos, so she’d be glad to drop John off.

  He wore a maroon cashmere sweater over an open-collar white shirt, with charcoal gray slacks. He carried the present Cindy had bought for the girl: a silk neck scarf.

  John was not shy. He had poise. When he handed Buffy her present and she kissed him, he was not flustered.

  None of these teenagers were shy or felt uncomfortable about being with members of the opposite sex. The girls and boys did not retreat to opposite sides of the room and titter. They chatted together, and shortly they began to dance. Buffy sought out John and waited for him to ask her to dance. He did.

  She was a newly matured girl: blond and softly, strikingly beautiful. She was taller than some of the boys at the party, though not taller than John. Her figure was filled out, perhaps as much as it ever would be, which set her apart from most of the girls. She wore a little pink lipstick. Her blond hair hung smoothly around her shoulders.

  “Hey, Perino,” said one of the boys as he and a girl danced close to John and Buffy. “You sticked me at practice Tuesday.”

  “Sorry, Ken. I didn’t mean to. I apologized at the time.”

  “You’re sure it was an accident?”

  “If I ever do it intentionally, you won’t stay on your feet,” said John.

  Buffy squeezed John. “You!” she laughed.

  In spite of Buffy’s promise that no liquor would be drunk at her birthday party, it was available. One of the boys generated a huge laugh among the other boys when they went in the bathroom and gingerly untied a condom bound to his leg. Poured into two glasses, it contained more than half a pint of vodka.

  Vodka was the liquor of choice, because it would not be on the young people’s breath when they went home. Besides the half pint delivered in the stretched condom, other half pints arrived in flasks and other concealable bottles. The liquor went into Cokes and ginger ale. A little of it was tossed back straight.

  John had never tried it before but, of course, was not going to refuse. Ken made sure his Coke got an especially heavy shot of vodka.

  None of them refused it. None got drunk—they had not smuggled in enough to do that—but an hour after the party began every one was gently happy.

  Some of the boys began a chant—“Tit-ies, tit-ies, tit-ies!”

  It was a game. The boys went down to the cellar of the carriage house, where lawn tools were now stored. The girls took off their sweaters, blouses, and bras. Each boy in turn was blindfolded and allowed to fumble his way up the stairs and into the game room. There one of the girls took his hand and led him to each of the others. He was allowed to feel the bare breasts of each girl and say who he thought she was.

  All the boys identified Buffy. She was the most fully developed. John identified her, and she kissed him on the cheek. She was the only girl he identified. Some of the other boys had played this game before and had a sense of what some of the girls were like. Others went steady and knew very well the feel of their own girl’s breasts. Everyone laughed as each boy guessed.

  Then another chant, this one from the girls. “Peck-er, peck-er, peck-er!”

  The girls trooped to the cellar. The boys took off their pants and undershorts and stood around the pool table. Each blindfolded girl circled the table, giggling as she handled shafts and scrotums, blushing as she spoke a name.

  Buffy lifted John’s erect shaft in her left hand and ran the fingers of her right hand over it. “This is John,” she whispered. All the boys applauded. She kissed him on the mouth before she returned to the cellar.

  In the kitchen a little later, where they poured tiny amounts of vodka into their Cokes, she took his hand in hers and said, “I knew it was you. Okay. I’ve touched it. Now I want to see it.”

  5

  Buffy could not contain her excitement. On the telephone the next morning, she told all to her friend Linda Falstaff.

  “Oh, God! You won’t believe!’”

  “Are you telling me you…?”

  “Jesus! Yes! And, hey! It was perfect! It was, like, more than I ever imagined! Oh, God, Lin! Jesus!”

  “How could you? I mean … the necessary privacy?”

  “Luck is how. Goddamned luck! Hey! You ‘n’ me went to see Prizzi’s Honor last week. I touted it to my father and mother—hey, never dreaming that would get to be important. But I knew when it let out. I knew they wouldn’t be home before a quarter after eleven. And the moms and dads picked the kids up about ten. Your mom—”

  “Old prompt-and-conscientious picked me up on the dot of ten.”

  “Right. By a quarter after, nobody was left but John and me and Muffy. Mom had said she’d drive Muffy home, ‘cause her folks were in New York for a play last night. She was gonna drive John home, too. So we had an hour to—”

  “But what’d Muffy do, sit and watch?”

  “We poured her all the vodka that was left. She had a pack of smokes. She sat on the bench outside and drank and smoked. Besides giving us our privacy, she was our watchdog, just in case. Talk about a friend.”

  “So what’d you guys do?”

  “Well … you know. What we wanted to do.”

  “Buffy Mead, if you don’t tell me every detail, we’re not friends anymore. We’ve had a deal for a long time. Right? The first one would tell the other one every last detail, so the other one would have the benefit of the experience. So it turns out—”

  “Okay! You couldn’t keep me from telling you.”

  “So. So how’d it go?”

  “I’m gonna admit something. I mean … faced with it, I mean really, I kinda chickened. And, hey! So did he. We both said, we don’t really have to. He said I didn’t have to. I asked him if he really wanted to, and he said yes. Well … that’d have made me a cockteaser, if I’d backed down. So I said, hey—and we did it.”

  “Stop there and I’ll kill you!”

  “Well … okay, we had to take off our clothes, of course. And we did that. And then we kissed. And he played a little bit with my boobies. But … you won’t believe this … he was kind of soft. I mean, it wasn’t the way it was when I grabbed it during the game. I was glad. He was a little afraid, the way I was. So I took it in my hands and rubbed it against my belly, and it got big and hard again, right off.”

  “I’ve touched them in the game. Would you believe I’ve never seen one?”

  “Lin, the thing is beautiful! I mean, it’s the total symbol of male power! We tried it on the couch. Not enough room. So I climbed up on the pool table, and he climbed up on the pool table, and … well … you know.”

  “Yes, I know. But tell me!”

  “Well … Lin … it’s not as easy as you might think. I spread my legs, and he got on top of me and started to shove himself in, and … well, it wasn’t easy. I was too tight for him. And then he went limp again. I used my hands to get him up, and he tried again. It … okay, I got up and bent down on him and spit on him, to make him slipperier. Then it worked. Then he got in. And then … God, Lin, it was heaven! I mean, he shoved it in so hard and so deep!”

  “Didn’t it hurt?”

  “Yes, it hurt, but it hurt good?. I tell you, Lin, if my father and mother had walked in right then, we’d have gone on till we were finished and talked about it afterward.”

  “Jesus! Didn’t you guys use a rubber?”

  “We’ll have to think about that next time.”

  “Buffy! You lucky bitch! John Perino!”

  “I love him, Lin. And he loves me, too. We talked about how we’d get married after we get out of school.”

  6

  Loren van Ludwige was fourteen years old. His father was proud of him. So was his mother. As had been agreed, he had finished his elementary schooling in an English public school and was now a student at l’École St. François Xavier in Paris.

  If the choice had been his, Loren would not have been there. Nor would he have attended St. George’s, where his bare buns had been flogged, first by masters, then by upperclassmen performing their duty of hazing. He had not wanted to play rugby, or to run cross country, or to row a scull. But he’d done it—and showered afterward under cold water. Knowing he would be sent to school in Paris later, he had studied French diligently and had won honors in the subject. He had won honors in math as well. His masters marked him deficient, though, in moral philosophy and economics.

  At l’École St. François Xavier he was no longer beaten. His worst punishment there was boredom. He knew all the French he’d ever need to know, and the subtleties of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century grammar, as found in the plays of Racine and the essays of Montesquieu, did not interest him. Educated at St. George’s to regard Napoleon as a monster, he was intrigued to discover that the emperor was a great national hero to the French. His instructors admired Loren’s mastery of numbers, but engineering courses were not offered at l’École. The curriculum emphasized the arts. He was expected to draw and paint, to compose a work of music, and to write a play—all in the manner of some French artist of another century, precisely identifying the influence and elucidating it in notes accompanying his work.

  None of the students were allowed outside the walls of the school’s grounds, except when they went together in the company of an instructor to visit the Louvre, Les Invalides, or some other museum or monument.

  Loren was intelligent enough to know he was receiving a superb education. But he looked forward to the day when he would move to an American university and taste the freedom he had heard American students enjoyed.

  The boarding schools his parents had chosen for him had given him one more thing he appreciated. At St. George’s his schoolmates had not liked the name Loren any better than he liked it himself. They had called him Ren. The French pronounced Loren Loh-rawn and would have called him Ron if he had not objected. He asked his classmates to call him Van, for van Ludwige. They liked that. To the French, “Van” was vin—wine. So he became Van. Some of his instructors innocently called him Van van Ludwige. To his father’s annoyance, he began to write his name Van Ludwige. Betsy was amused that he had dropped his first name, but she still thought of him as Loren the Fourth and didn’t tell her father he had renounced the name.

  Van had inherited the best of the Hardeman genes, plus some very good ones from Max van Ludwige. He was an exceptionally handsome, tall, well-built young man.

  At fourteen he had the same problem many fourteen-year-old boys confronted—he was sexually mature and sexually deprived. So was his roommate, Charles Bizien. They looked to each other to solve the problem—promising, however, that they were not “that kind of fellow” and would turn to females as soon as an opportunity arose.

  Their sexual encounters were dangerous. Monitors patrolled the halls of the dormitories and could walk in on them at any moment. The first one who woke, probably to go to the bathroom, at, say, three or four in the morning, woke the other.

  They did something that was a tradition at l’École St. François Xavier: rather than go down the hall to the toilet at three or four in the morning, they pissed out the window. It was so common that windows in the dormitory were called pissoirs. Whoever woke first would stir his roommate before he went to the window. The one who had not wakened first paid a penalty: to have to take into his mouth the final drops of urine that could never be gotten rid of and remained for the roommate to taste. They sucked each other off in the hour before dawn. They rarely missed a night. Nearly every pair of roommates did it.

  As Van and Charles were both Europeans, neither boy was circumcised. Neither one could imagine how a man could enjoy sex if his most sensitive nerves had been cut off and thrown away. They pinched each other’s foreskins between their fingers and used their tongues and lips on them to further animate their pulsing penises.

  They did not attempt anal penetration. It didn’t appeal to them, though it did to some of the boys at l’École St. François Xavier. For variation, they masturbated, sometimes rubbing their cocks together, sometimes each boy manipulating his own, sometimes each doing the other.

  They proclaimed themselves undying friends who would love each other all their lives. Each one, though, declared he wanted a girl and would love her even more.

  7

  On the night when John Perino took Buffy Mead’s virginity—and gave her his—Van Ludwige and Charles Bizien sucked each other for the hundredth or hundred-fiftieth time. Because of the time difference, it may have occurred at the same hour.

  At that hour, too, Cindy was in bed with Marcus in Amanda’s studio apartment. Betsy, who had by now given birth to a daughter by Viscount Neville and had just learned she was pregnant again, awoke and roused Angelo. Her husband was trying a case at the Winchester assizes, and she had been unable to resist the opportunity to be with Angelo at least one more time.

  XXV

  1987

  1

  Loren and Roberta sat over lunch with Betsy in the Neville town house facing Grosvenor Square. It was a Regency house, not entirely as elegant as the flat Betsy had given up on Regent’s Park, but roomier, with lots of space for the three children living at home: John Hardeman and Charlotte and George Neville. The viscount’s mother had moved out reluctantly, consenting to do so only when she learned that three young children were about to move in. She had taken most of her furniture, which had suited Betsy perfectly. At Angelo’s suggestion—though the origin of the suggestion was known to almost no one—she had engaged Marcus Lincicombe as a consultant to help her explore the shops of London for the furniture and art that turned the house into a showplace.