Rumpelstiltskin

1

I have it on good authority that a certain type of man, upon getting divorced, will run out to buy himself a motorcycle and will then begin dating nineteen-year-old girls. Me, I had the dent taken out of my Karmann Ghia’s fender, had the entire car repainted a muted beige that blends well with the sand on Calusa’s beaches, and didn’t date anyone at all for the six months following the final decree. My partner Frank insists this was abnormal; he is the “good authority” who offered the Honda-cum-Pubescent-Girl Theory.

But the ritual postures of “dating” are not easily recalled or reenacted by a thirty-seven-year-old man who was married to the same woman for fourteen years and who himself has a daughter not too far removed in age from all those long-legged, long-haired nineteen-year-old beauties. Joanna — long-legged, long-haired, and beautiful in her own right — has just turned thirteen and has finally begun sprouting the breasts she’s been coveting for the past eternity of her life. I love her to death, but I get to see her only every other weekend and for half the duration of her school vacations.

I’m a lawyer by trade, but it was not I who negotiated the terms of my own divorce settlement. In law, as in medicine, there are so-called specialists: the real estate lawyer, the tax lawyer, the corporation lawyer, the copyright lawyer, the matrimonial or family relations lawyer, who — in the case of Eliot McLaughlin, at least — might better have been called a criminal lawyer in that he most certainly committed a crime of enormous severity when he allowed me to sign such an onerous separation agreement in a state noted for its liberal divorce laws. Eliot kept telling me, however, that I was the guilty party. This meant that my former wife Susan, while not quite discovering me in flagrante delicto, had nonetheless learned that I was having what is euphemistically known as “an affair” with a married lady named Agatha Hemmings, who has since divorced her spouse as well and who is now living in Tampa. All water under the bridge, as they say. There are a great many bridges in Calusa, Florida, and a whole hell of a lot of water.

My partner Frank says that Calusa is not a bad place in which to live if a man is recently divorced and suddenly finds himself footloose and fancy-free. For Frank, who is a transplanted New Yorker, than which there is nothing worse, this is a tremendously generous admission. He is obliquely referring, of course, to the plenitude of widows, divorcées, and aforementioned teenyboppers who clutter Calusa’s splendid beaches seeking solace in the sunshine and who — according to Frank — are all ripe for the taking. I would be most reluctant to take any of those nubile nineteen-year-olds; in fact, I would be terrified. What do you talk about afterward? The latest Fleetwood Mac album? As for those blue-haired, tightly girdled widows in their late sixties and early seventies, I must confess they do little to stir my middle-aged blood. Middle-aged, yes. I figure my life expectancy to be somewhere between seventy and seventy-five (else why all those widows running around?), and thirty-seven is half of seventy-four, so there you are. The divorcées are quite another matter. In the past few months I’ve discovered that they come in all sizes, shapes, and colors and that an ever-increasing number of them are between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five, just about right for a man my age. Frank, in his partisan New Yorker way, says it’s truly unfortunate that most of them come from the Midwest. But that’s because if you draw a line due south from Columbus, Ohio, it will go straight through the center of Calusa. Frank says that Calusa is only Michigan on the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe he’s right.

The eastern rim of Calusa Bay is jaggedly defined by U.S. 41, more familiarly known as the Tamiami Trail. It is Frank’s belief that “Tamiami” is redneck for “To Miami.” Again, he may be right; if you follow 41 south, it eventually leads to Alligator Alley, which then crosses the Florida peninsula to the east coast of the state. There are five keys off Calusa’s mainland, but only three of them — Stone Crab, Sabal, and Whisper — run north-south, paralleling the mainland shore. Flamingo Key and Lucy’s Key are situated like massive steppingstones across the water, connecting the mainland first to Sabal and then to Stone Crab — which is where Victoria Miller was singing in the lounge of the newest restaurant on the beach.

It was one of those January nights rare for Calusa, eternally and extravagantly promised to the tourists, but only infrequently materializing. During Calusa’s long winter months the mean average temperature is sixty-two degrees, seventeen on the Celsius scale, but this only means that the daytime temperatures hover in the mid-fifties, much too chilly for swimming in ocean or unheated pool, and at night they sometimes plunge into the lower thirties, reason enough for the orange-growers to run scrambling for their smudge pots. But today the weather had been exactly what the snowbirds pray for — a combination of clear blue sky, brilliant sunshine, and temperatures in the high seventies. As I parked the Ghia in the lot behind the restaurant, a soft balmy breeze wafted in off the Gulf and a wisp of cloud brushed past the face of the moon; the blacktop underfoot was suddenly awash in molten silver. There was the sound of piano music in the distance. I began walking toward it.

The Greenery had opened at the start of the season in October. Each year in Calusa a dozen or more new restaurants make their bid for longevity, but if one of the dozen survives by the end of the season it’s a miracle of no small proportions. My partner Frank says that a class act hasn’t got a chance in Calusa; the migratory midwestern “clods,” as he calls them, are looking for places advertising family dinners at $4.95. The Greenery was a class act indeed, and by Frank’s reasoning it should have closed a month after it opened. The food and service were excellent, the cuisine Continental (certain death in a town where travelers driving campers are searching for pizzerias or hamburger joints), and the decor was nothing short of stunning, having been designed by a client of ours named Charles Hoggs, who was also responsible for the mall downtown at Riverpoint. The restaurant had, at one time, in fact been a nursery, and Charlie had used the existing greenhouse as the entrance, adding the lounge and main dining room behind it as a series of similarly glass-enclosed rooms. The Greenery was never open for lunch, so glaring sunlight wasn’t a problem. The owners had hired the services of a woman named Catherine Brenet, with whom I had had an unpleasant professional experience not too long ago, and it was she who kept the various rooms hung with fresh plants delivered on an almost-daily basis from her shop, Le Fleur de Lis, next door to the Royal Palms Hotel downtown on South Bayview. I hoped the Greenery made it — if only for Vicky’s sake.

She had sung hard rock back in the mid-sixties, but the music coming from inside the place now, louder as I approached the greenhouse entrance, was the sort of stuff the big bands used to play back in the late thirties and early forties, a little before either her time or mine. I myself was born in 1943, a year after my father went off to fight World War II. Actually, he did no fighting at all. As an attorney practicing before the Illinois bar, he was assigned immediately to the Judge Advocate General’s Office and spent most of the war as a commissioned officer at Fort Bragg. When he was discharged in 1945, it was with the rank of lieutenant colonel. The music I listened to as a teenager in Chicago was a music in transition from pop to rock. My heroes and heroines (in addition to Elvis, of course) were groups with names that by today’s standards sound demure if not downright prissy: The Elegants, The Everly Brothers, The Platters, The Champs, Danny and the Juniors, and so on. Victoria Miller did not erupt onto the scene until rock had taken a firmer hold, in 1965, when she had just turned twenty and I was twenty-two and studying law in my father’s footsteps at Northwestern. By that time I was presumably too mature, determined, and career-minded to notice any longer what was happening in the world of popular music; at our initial meeting three weeks ago, when Vicky mentioned the title of her first big-hit, million-copy, gold-record best-seller fifteen years back, I was hard put to remember it. The title, incidentally, was “Frenzy.” The name of her backup group was Wheat, and the song — later extracted as a hit single — appeared on an album pressed by Regal Records, a firm now defunct but which at the time had its headquarters in New Orleans.

There was a poster-sized photograph of Vicky in the lobby, on one of those wooden tripod affairs that look like artists’ easels. The picture had undoubtedly been taken by a professional photographer, which meant that the long black hair framing Vicky’s face seemed altogether too sleek, the lips cradling her smile too glossy, her dark eyes sparkling with those phony little pupil-pinpoints of light professional photographers are taught to capture on film in order to make their subjects appear “alive.” She seemed, in the photograph, almost an abstraction of herself, all character smoothed and polished out of her face, as bland as bleached flour. She seemed, too, a great deal younger than her almost thirty-five years, and I wondered if the picture hadn’t been taken back in the heyday of her career, when she was enjoying the heady success of three gold-record albums in as many years. The script lettering on the photo’s white background announced: NOW APPEARING: VICTORIA MILLER, RECORDING ARTIST. She had not been a “recording artist” for almost twelve years now. She had opened here at the Greenery on Friday night, and this was Sunday, but I had spent the weekend with my daughter, Joanna, sailing down to Sanibel and back on my boat The Windbag — one of the few material possessions I’d salvaged from my marriage — and had dropped her off at Susan’s only half an hour ago. This was my first opportunity to catch Vicky’s act, and I was eagerly looking forward to it.

It was ten minutes to nine when a hostess in a long black gown slit to the thigh on the right leg led me to a table near the bandstand. In Calusa many of the “family” restaurants offered early dinners at discount rates to senior citizens. The codgers, as I used to call them whenever I wished to annoy my former wife, also enjoyed these discount rates in Calusa’s various movie theaters; catch the five o’clock show, and they let you in for $1.50. The Greenery, however, was a restaurant striving for a clientele somewhat more lofty than all those doddering ladies in their wedgies and their hapless mates in Hawaiian-print sports shirts. The dinner hour started at seven here. Vicky was doing one show each night, at nine o’clock, presumably timed to catch those diners who wanted an after-dinner drink in the lounge, or those customers intent on heavier drinking in the hours before midnight. There was only a handful of people in the room when I took my seat at the table; I did not consider this a very encouraging sign.

Almost every restaurant, bar, or lounge in Calusa offered some sort of “live” entertainment, but usually this consisted of a bearded kid strumming a guitar and singing either folk songs or “a little tune I wrote last summer while hitching through the beautiful mountains of North Carolina.” The man playing the piano in the glassed-in lounge, however, was a musician of some note (no pun intended), who had pursued a career as a concert pianist in New York before retiring and building a home on Sabal Key here in Calusa. He often accompanied visiting guest artists at the Helen Gottlieb Memorial Auditorium, and had previously tickled the ivories for the likes of Joan Sutherland, Beverly Sills, and Marian Anderson. Apparently the Greenery was sparing no expense in trying to lure the dinner crowd from its many competitors; January was high season in Calusa, and if they didn’t make the big bucks now and in the several months to follow, they might very well be out of business the day after Easter.

At nine sharp the lights dimmed. Over the loudspeaker system a voice said, “Ladies and gentlemen... Miss Victoria Miller.” Vicky appeared rather like an apparition in shimmering white, caught in the circle of a follow spot that led her relentlessly onto the small bandstand. She touched her accompanist briefly on the shoulder in greeting and, head ducked shyly, stepped swiftly into the curve of the grand piano. She lifted her head and tossed her long black hair. She smiled radiantly at the audience. The spot faded, to be replaced by a cool blue beam of light that turned her gown to glare ice. The piano introduction lingered. Vicky seemed to catch her breath. She brought the microphone to her lips and began to sing.

In all truth, she was awful.

“How was I?” she asked.

We were in the Karmann Ghia, driving around Lucy’s Circle on the way to the mainland. The dashboard clock read 11:05 p.m. Vicky had changed into street clothes; she was wearing a dark blue skirt, high-heeled navy patent pumps, a white blouse, and a pale blue cardigan sweater. Her long legs were crossed somewhat recklessly, and she kept jiggling one foot. I had known only one other performer in my lifetime, a student at Northwestern who worked weekends as a stand-up comic in a Chicago gin mill on North Wells. After each performance he would be strung as tight as a high-tension wire. Vicky was the same way now, virtually vibrating on the seat beside me. That was good because I planned to take her to bed.

“You were terrific,” I said.

“Do you think they liked me?”

“They loved you,” I said.

“I thought they did, but you know you never can tell.”

“Couldn’t you tell?”

“No, I really couldn’t.”

“All that applause,” I said.

“Yes, they did clap a lot,” Vicky said.

The traffic around the Circle was maddening. The restaurants were disgorging late diners, and the high school kids were arriving in throngs to join the festivities at the Circle’s two disco joints. There was always heavy traffic in the Circle. During the daytime it was impossible to park there, and during the night it was impossible to drive there, and the whole damn thing was a bad idea except for the merchants who ran the boutiques, souvenir shops, jewelry stores, and the myriad other emporiums offering treasures for sale. But there was only one way to get from Stone Crab Key to the mainland, and that was over the humpback bridge connecting it to Sabal, and then around the Circle on Lucy’s Key and over the Cortez Causeway. A horn sounded on my left. I yanked the wheel to the right and swore under my breath as a carload of teenagers raced by; the kid sitting alongside the driver flashed a moon at us.

“Did you think they were talking a lot?” Vicky asked.

“Who do you mean?”

“The people. While I was singing.”

“No, no. That’s usual.”

“Is it?”

“Well... I mean... don’t you know?”

“Actually, no,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t used to perform live.”

“You didn’t?”

“No.”

“You mean when you had those hit records?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t perform live?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Eddie wouldn’t let me.”

“Eddie?”

“My producer. At Regal.”

“Ah.”

“Eddie said it was bad for the records, he wanted everybody to go out and buy the records, you see.”

“Maybe he was right.”

“Oh, sure. Three gold records, you know, that’s a lot.”

“It is,” I said.

“But you think they liked me, huh?”

“They loved you.”

“I was so nervous. Did it show? That I was nervous?”

“Not a bit.”

“I could use a drink,” she said. “And some grass. Do you have any grass at your place?”

“No,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Would you mind if we went to my place then?”

“Well...”

I was thinking about her daughter. I was thinking that my place didn’t have a six-year-old daughter sleeping in the room down the hall from Mommy’s bedroom. I was thinking that my place had a nice big swimming pool in which we could frolic naked before getting down to more serious matters. I was thinking that my place had a nice big king-sized bed and that the sheets on it had been changed just that morning, and I was thinking that were we to climb into that king-sized bed to consummate what had been tantalizingly postponed for three weeks now — actually three weeks and two days, since we’d met at a gallery opening on a Friday night, and this was now a Sunday — were we to realize the full potential of our relationship by moving our somewhat tentative courtship off the dime in my king-sized bed tonight, then there would be no six-year-old cherub wandering down the hallway to ask Mommy for a drink of water, not in my place. I did not want to go to Vicky’s place. My “Well...” made that abundantly clear — the slight inflection at the end of the word, the ringingly dubious note conveying reluctance if not downright obstinateness.

“Well,” she said right back at me, and both of us fell silent.

We were on the Causeway now. Calusa Bay spread to the right and left of us. Out on the water, I could see the lights of several anchored sailboats. We were silent all the way across the bridge. I stopped for the traffic light on the corner of Cortez and 41. The silence lengthened. My place was northward to the left, Vicky’s place was southward to the right. The light on Cortez and 41 is a very long light.

“What we could do...” I said.

“Yes?”

“Is go to your place for the pot, if that’s what you’d...”

“Yes?”

“And then go back to my place.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If that’s what you’d like to do.”

“Because I really would like to smoke some dope, you know.”

“Okay, if that’s what you...”

“So if it isn’t any trouble...”

“No trouble at...”

“We could go to my place first...”

“Yes, that’s what we’ll...”

“And then I could check on Allie and...”

“That sounds...”

“And tell the sitter I want her to stay a while longer.”

“Maybe she could even sleep over,” I said.

“No, I don’t think she can do that. She’s only fifteen.”

“Okay, but tell her...”

“I’ll tell her maybe two, three o’clock — would that be all right?”

“That’d be fine,” I said.

“You’ve got the light,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“The green light,” she said.

All the way out 41 to the Cross River Mall and then eastward to Vicky’s house, visions of sugarplum fairies danced in my head. I had known her for three weeks and two days and had taken her out twice during that time, once to dinner and another time to a late movie. On our second date (I despise that word) we were getting very friendly on her living room couch when six-year-old Allison walked in rubbing her eyes and wanting to know who the nice man was and asking whether she could show me the finger paintings she’d made in school that day. I looked at fourteen finger paintings. They were very nice finger paintings. I did not even know the little tyke’s last name — Vicky had gone back to using her maiden name after the divorce — but I raved nonetheless over her prodigious talent. She wanted to know why Mommy’s blouse was unbuttoned. Vicky wasn’t wearing a bra; I had discovered that in the fifteen minutes before Allison’s untimely arrival. She buttoned her blouse, and Allison sat on the rug in front of the couch and began drawing with her crayons, her long black hair falling in a curtain over her face as she worked. The clock on the mantel read ten minutes to one. In the morning. I asked Allison if she didn’t think she might like to go back to sleep so she could wake up nice and early and go to the beach tomorrow. Allison said she hated the beach. “I turn lobster red in the sun,” she said. Allison was a born artist. She made seven crayon drawings for me before the little porcelain mantel clock chimed the half-hour. When at last she yawned, hope sprang eternal. But she only got up to go to the kitchen to make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She offered me a bite. I left the house at two a.m., wondering what the penalty was for biting six-year-old girls in self-defense. I would have to ask Benny Weiss, who was a criminal lawyer.

But tonight... ah, tonight.

The omens all seemed ripe for gratification. Vicky had, to begin with, invited me to her opening weekend at the Greenery, which seemed to indicate an interest more than casual. She had chosen me with whom to share this big event in her life, singing again in public — well, wait, she’d never sung in public before, according to her own testimony — but singing again, at any rate, after a hiatus of almost twelve years. And she was now choosing to share with me the afterglow of the event, asking only that she be allowed to pick up some grass at her place, which would help to calm her later in the cloistered privacy of my living room, both of us sitting there and smoking our brains out (I had begun smoking pot only since the divorce) while I removed first the pale blue cardigan sweater, and then the white silk blouse to expose once again those magnificent breasts I had only briefly glimpsed and touched last Friday (before Allison made her entrance and called to Mommy’s attention the fact that one rubescent nipple was about to make an entrance of its own) and then the blue skirt and the pantyhose — I hate pantyhose; whoever invented them should be shot along with the man who invented those electric hand dryers you find in men’s rooms all over America — and then we would wander together into my bedroom where I would draw back the covers and we would slide together between cool clean sheets to discover each other at last. I was feeling extremely horny. I drove much faster than I normally would have; the cops in Calusa, Florida, are not noted for their charity to speeders.

Vicky lived in a small development house on a street called Citrus Lane on the eastern rim of the county. Drive six miles past her house and you found yourself in cattle country. This was one of the things that first astonished me about Florida. If you’re born and raised in Illinois, you naturally think of Florida as consisting solely of palm trees and beaches. But there are two million head of cattle in the state, and you don’t have to drive very far out of Calusa before coming into miles and miles of fenced-in grazing land — with the cows all facing in the same direction, it seems. A single light was burning in Vicky’s house as I pulled the car into the driveway.

“Do you want to come in?” she asked.

“You won’t be long, will you?”

“Just to get the grass,” she said, “and to look in on Allie.”

“I’ll wait here then.”

“I won’t be long,” she said, and leaned over, and put one hand widespread on my thigh, and kissed me open-mouthed before she got out of the car. I watched her as she walked to the front door of the house. She was, I guessed, about five feet eight inches tall, her long black hair trailing halfway down her back and swaying gently with each long-legged stride she took. She possessed, I noticed for the hundredth time, a truly glorious ass and splendid legs; once again I envisioned myself taking off all her clothes. Sitting behind the wheel of the Ghia in the darkness, vaguely tumescent, I heard a raccoon making a hell of a racket as he rummaged through someone’s garbage. I hoped he would not wake the Dread Allison.

As promised, Vicky was back in no time at all. She did not go around to her side of the car. Instead, she put her folded arms on the window frame on my side and said through the open window, “I’m sorry, Matthew.”

“What?” I said.

“I can’t go with you.”

“Why not?”

“Allie’s coming down with something.”

I don’t know why, but I immediately felt she was lying. Perhaps it was only my own disappointment. The red-blooded American male’s dream of conquest shattered, rejection rampant in the near-midnight stillness of Citrus Lane.

“She’s been coughing all night. The sitter thinks she may have a fever.”

“Well, I... that’s too bad,” I said.

“Why don’t you come in instead?”

“Well, if your daughter’s sick...”

“The sitter gave her some Nyquil. She’s asleep now.”

I hesitated. My previous experience with Allison indicated that she was not a very heavy sleeper. On the other hand, if the sitter had really given her something to knock her out...

“Well,” I said.

I could not shake the feeling that Vicky was lying to me.

“Please come in,” she said. “I want you to.”

I nodded.

“Will you?”

“Well, all right, I guess so.”

“Thank you,” she said.

The sitter was waiting in the living room. She was a round-faced, plump little teenager wearing blue jeans, no shoes, and a man’s tailored shirt with the tails hanging loose.

“This is Mr. Hope,” Vicky said. “How many hours was that, Charlene?”

“Four,” Charlene said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said.

Vicky was counting out bills. She handed a wad of them to Charlene, who counted them twice, like a teller at Calusa First Independent, and then stuffed them into the right-hand pocket of her jeans. “Well, g’night,” she said.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” Vicky asked.

“What for? It’s just across the street.”

“I’ll watch till you’re inside then,” Vicky said.

“Sure,” Charlene said. She sounded puzzled. “Well, g’night,” she said again, and went out the front door. Vicky stood in the doorway, watching as she crossed the street to a house diagonally opposite. There were lights burning there in what I guessed was the living room. Charlene opened a door at the side of the house, waved back at Vicky to signal her safe crossing, and then went inside and closed the door behind her. The light over the door went out, the lights in the living room stayed on. Vicky closed and bolted her own front door.

“So,” she said.

“So,” I said. I was thinking of six-year-old Allison in her bedroom down the hall. I was thinking of finger paintings and crayon drawings and another early-morning art exhibit. Vicky must have read my mind.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “she’s sound asleep.” She caught her breath the way she had before she’d started singing earlier tonight, and then she moved into my arms and pressed herself close to me and lifted her mouth to mine and kissed me.

The grass was very good stuff that had made its way across the Gulf of Mexico on God-knew-which fishing boat to be carried ashore on God-knew-which deserted Florida beach; dope is the second biggest industry in the State of Florida. It should have calmed Vicky after the first few tokes, but it seemed to have no effect at all on her. Neither did the good cognac she poured into two huge snifters. Her tension was almost palpable. She jumped at every sound outside the house — a cat crooning his strident love song to another cat, an automobile passing in the midnight stillness, a locomotive somewhere far in the distance, rushing through the night. We had turned on the television set, and we sat on the couch before it, the black-and-white images of an old movie flickering to provide the only illumination in the room, passing the second joint between us, alternately sipping at the cognac. I felt no sense of urgency. I was beginning to believe that Allison really would sleep through the night, and that there would be no need for any frantic adolescent fumbling at buttons, no cause for desperate, hasty kisses designed to entice and entrap before imminent discovery. But Vicky was trembling in my arms.

“Come on,” I said, “relax. It’s all over now.”

I was referring to her performance at the Greenery.

She sighed and said, “I only wish it were.”

I did not know what she meant.

She caught her breath again; I realized, suddenly that the mannerism was a nervous tic. And then, all at once, perhaps because of the strain of her opening weekend, perhaps because of the combined pot and cognac, she began talking about her fairy tale rise to prominence as a rock star back in the sixties, and as I listened, I felt closer to her than I’d ever been since I’d known her. There are men — and I shamefacedly admit that I am among them — who will want to take a woman to bed because she is what they have been taught to believe is “sexy,” whatever the hell that may mean, whatever combination of hip and thigh and lips and hair and breast may coalesce to create the image of someone quintessentially desirable. As Vicky told me about her spectacular ascendance to stardom, I began to like her. And I wanted to go to bed with her now for that reason alone: because genuinely, after three weeks and two days, I liked her.

She told me that until her “discovery,” as it was later described in all the newspaper and magazine articles written about her, she’d been doing one-night stands in lounges and honky-tonk roadhouses in and around Little Rock, Arkansas, causing very little local stir and seemingly destined for anonymity. Her father Dwayne — who’d been a widower since Vicky was fourteen, and who’d been nurturing her singing “career” ever since she got paid ten dollars for her first gig at a dive called Rocky’s Corner in Sweet Home, Arkansas, just outside Little Rock — decided in 1964 that his then nineteen-year-old daughter was destined for bigger and better things. He promptly popped her into the family’s 1962 Buick sedan one weekend and drove her across the border into Memphis and then northward to Nashville, where there were more record companies than there were fleas on hound dogs. After four days of pounding the pavements and knocking on unreceptive doors, Dwayne and his nubile daughter ran across a young guitar player in the lounge of the Holiday Inn at which they were staying, and he told them there was no way a’tall to make it there in Nashville, the competition was too keen, the town was swarming with too damn many ambitious musicians. Only place to be was N’Orleans, he told them, which was where he was heading soon as he paid his hotel bill and got himself a bus ticket south. The guitar player’s name was Geoffrey Hamilton; he would later become the lead guitarist in Wheat, the group that backed Vicky on her first hit album.

Why Hamilton concluded that New Orleans was the “only place to be” remained something of a mystery to Vicky. There were, to be sure, several record companies in that city, but they were mostly cutting jazz, and only a few of them were willing even to see aspiring amateurs. One of them was a firm called Regal Records, and its president was a man named Anthony Konig; the “Regal” was a deliberate reference to “Konig,” which meant “King” in German. Back then in 1964 Konig was a handsome giant of a man in his early forties, blessed with an inheritance from a father who’d been a wealthy soybean farmer in West Carroll County, and determined to make a mark for himself in the music business. It was not difficult to understand how Victoria Miller, tall, gorgeous, and voluptuously ripe at the age of nineteen going on twenty, had captured Konig’s imagination. He immediately arranged for an audition for her and her itinerant guitar-player friend, tossing into the mix a pair of musicians he had previously auditioned — the bass guitarist and the drummer who would later join Geoffrey Hamilton in the group called Wheat.

“That was the real beginning,” she said, and caught her breath again. “Oh, Matthew, it seems so very long ago.” She turned into my arms, and kissed me suddenly and deeply, and then rose swiftly from the couch, ground out the roach in an ashtray, and said, “I want us to make love now.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Please,” she said, and extended her hand to me.

In the light of later events, it is difficult not to ascribe to those next three hours in Vicky’s bedroom an ulterior purpose that had nothing to do with the act of love. There was, it seemed to me even then, an excessive need to please, an almost compulsive desire to make this a memorable experience, some sort of gala occasion that would enter the annals of marathon lovemaking as our night of nights, perhaps to break all existing records in Mr. Guinness’s massive tome. I had since my divorce been with women who trotted out their bag of sexual tricks like magicians eager to baffle with dexterity and skill. I had been with women who shyly played the virgin while dispensing energetic head surely superior to any offered by all the whores of Bombay. I had been with women eager to learn (“Am I doing this right, Matthew?”) and eager to teach (“I will take you where you’ve never been”). I had been with women easily shocked (“Oh, God, this is absolutely disgusting!”) and easily shocking (“I once did it with two black guys and a Labrador retriever”), but those three hours with Vicky Miller, on her bed, in her bedroom, while her daughter slept the sleep of angels just down the hall, were more savagely sexual than any I had ever spent with any woman, or any pair of women, in my life.

By two-thirty in the morning I was spent, satiated, and silently wishing that little Allison would knock on the bedroom door to ask for some cough medicine or a mustard plaster. Vicky was just starting, it seemed. I do not know how she managed to prepare me once again for obedient service to her unabated lust, but manage she did. When at last I lay back exhausted against the pillow again, the small porcelain clock in the living room was chiming 3:00 a.m., and her restless hand was already beginning to fidget beseechingly where I ached and throbbed, fearful that all those stories my mother told me about it falling off if I abused it were about to come horribly true. Her mouth descended again.

“Vicky,” I said wearily, “I have to go.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t.”

“Really, it’s...”

“Stay the night,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

I was thinking I had to be in the office at nine. I was thinking that if my own daughter were six years old, I would not want her waking up at eight to discover a naked stranger shaving in her mother’s bathroom. I was thinking I’d had enough. I was thinking I’d had enough to last me till St. Swithin’s Day, which isn’t even celebrated in the United States of America.

“Stay,” she whispered, and lowered her insistent mouth again.

“Vicky, honey, I love you but...”

“No, you don’t love me,” she said.

“Honey, I’m...”

“Then stay.”

“Exhausted...”

“If you love me, stay.”

“No...”

“Please.”

“I can’t...”

“Matthew, please Matthew, stay Matthew, please darling, stay darling, please Matthew please...”

Her voice murmured liquidly and hypnotically against my flaccid cock, plaintively urgent, her body reversed as she hovered above me in a fiercely determined crouch, “Please Matthew, please baby, stay baby, please say yes baby, please Matthew,” her mouth swallowing her own murmured words as she enjoined and entreated, devouring and demanding, a rutting feral beast of the field with an appetite too voracious to appease — or so I thought at the time. When at last she recognized defeat, when at last she realized that she could not coax with her supplicating mouth even the tiniest hint of desire from me, she reversed her position once again, straddling me, and clasped my face between her hands and leaned forward to kiss me gently and sisterly on the mouth and the cheeks. “Just to sleep with me, Matthew, all right?” she said. “I promise I won’t bother you, I want to sleep in your arms is all, will you do that for me, Matthew, just say you’ll do that for me, please Matthew,” her words interspersed with those gentle flicking kisses and hummingbird caresses of tongue. It was ten minutes past three in the morning. I kissed her lingeringly on the mouth, and then held her away from me and looked into her eyes.

“Vicky,” I said, “I really have to go.”

“Okay,” she said abruptly, “fine,” and rolled away from me, and turned her back, and pulled the sheet over her.

“My clothes are at the house...”

“Sure.”

“The clothes I need for work...”

“Sure.”

“And my briefcase...”

“So why don’t you just go?” she said.

“Vicky,” I said, “I’d be embarrassed to have your daughter find me here when she—”

“You weren’t so embarrassed when you came in my mouth,” she said.

“Vicky...”

“So just go, okay?”

I dressed swiftly and silently, and then I went to the bed where she lay with her face turned away from me. Tentatively I kissed her on the cheek.

“Never mind,” she said.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “Today, actually. Later today.”

“Don’t bother,” she said.

“Vicky, honey...”

“Good night, Matthew,” she said.

I debated saying something further, and decided not to. I was starting for the bedroom door when she said behind me, “You’ll be sorry.” I turned to look at her. She was still lying with her hair spread on the pillow, her face and her eyes averted. Quickly I went out of the room.

That was the last time I saw her alive.