18mm Blues (17 page)

She stopped work and got him some coffee. He'd already had four strong cups, two more than usual, and was sure another would give him the rattles. She sat him on one of the high stools at the big table and went back at it. He thought it proper not to make conversation, although he had a lot he wanted to say to her, told himself not to abuse this privilege of sharing what normally was a private time for her. His attention was ambivalent, interested in the paint colors mixed and applied as though they were her internal garden, and taken with her, her intensity as she focused or contemplated, stepped back and appraised. He didn't realize how much tone her body had built up until she took a momentary break and he saw the letdown, a minor collapse.

“I usually paint in the nude,” she said lightly. “And until recently I've been quite sloppy. I don't know what's gotten into me. All at once I seem compelled to be neat. Look, not a dribble or even a drop.”

She was barefoot, had on a gauzy white cotton skirt that wasn't quite opaque and a blue-and-white striped cotton boy's shirt with its sleeves rolled up to the elbow and its front unbuttoned four down. She came over to the table with a brush in hand, reached for a Pepperidge Farm oatmeal raisin.

It was as if Grady had promised his arms that the next time she was within range they could have their way. One of his arms pulled her to him, the other went around and surely captured. For an instant Grady was eyes-to-eyes with her, able, it seemed, to hear her eyes. Her pupils were dilated with want, declaring it.

That first kiss was not all crush and feeding. There was adequate sureness in it to allow prelusion, lips reaching on their own to achieve the slightest touch, brushing as lightly as possible, back and forth, while tongues remained contained, pink, slick animals poised in their lairs.

The kiss lasted even when it hesitated, even when it was not a touching kiss it was bound by anticipation and with breaths mixing. Julia hadn't ever felt so strong and yet weak. For Grady the same. Aroused and in the darkness of their kissing, in the parrying of tongues, the sucking exchanges, Grady was told by everything within him, like the voice of his blood and all his organs and fibers, that this was not merely sex.

“Let's go upstairs,” she whispered and led him up to her bedroom, where she threw off the covers completely and transformed the bed into a plain, sheeted tract for loving. He paid no attention to his own undressing, did not deny himself the part of it that was the observing of her removing what little she had on, the arming out of the boy's shirt, the undoing and dropping of her skirt and her stepping from the circle of it. Her fingers were his allies. He was surprised but grateful that she wasn't inhibited.

Actually, Julia had never been so entirely shameless. It was as though some membranous constraint had been removed, leaving her exempt of guilt, released to range the entire realm of sensation, whatever pleased. Exercising such total latitude, she reached down and felt herself, felt how gorged were the exterior lips down there, puffed apart to create between them a wettened crease, reigned over by her clitoris, usually reticent but now erect, demanding to protrude, insisting to be touched.

He came to her, his erection unwieldy, like an antenna determining the way, and it was then between them, embraced against the skin of his stomach and the skin of hers, and she slid both her hands into that vise from the left and the right to claim it.

He resisted the extreme hurry he felt, asked his awareness to register surely the surroundings, the fragrance of her, the faint apathetic sounds of the city in motion, the form of her shoulder blades, the small of her back, the ladder of her spine. As though he was supplying a private time capsule before he was beyond the point of any such objectivity.

The slash of sunlight upon the sheet was upon them. They lay against each other full length, gently pressured. Both were grateful that this first time was in the bright time of day, allowing eyes their due participation.

She kneeled up beside him so her eyes could travel him, his various planes, and transitions, neck to shoulder to chest to abdomen. It seemed she could hear the speed of his blood, the high-pitched, sustained note of his passion. Watched his chest heave bellowlike, his abdomen go concave with tension, his effort to keep his eyes open as her fingers traced his erection, length and breadth, and especially the taut, finest skin of all.

CHAPTER SEVEN

They were, all that day and night, lost in the loving land.

The following day, Sunday, they tacitly agreed on replenishment but were constantly reassuring each other with spontaneous touches, arms around, smiles. They refrained from declarations of love, kept those words nearly said in their throats while they were being surely said in their eyes. Time would tell, they felt. In fact, time was telling.

They drove down to Market Street for Julia to see the office Grady had leased. Two rooms on the second floor of 760, the Phelan Building, the same where Harold Havermeyer so extensively occupied the top. Grady's new office was in the rear, its windows shadowed by the heights of close-by structures. The previous tenants had been two Armenian brothers, specialists in cutting and polishing. One could see the scars of their labor on the bare floor, where their workbenches had been anchored and where oil had too often dripped and permeated. One plaster wall was thoroughly splattered with oil. And in another place there were crumbling gapes where the supports of a heavy shelf had been torn out.

Seeing the space now for the second time and with Julia along, Grady had misgivings. It wasn't only that it diminished his feelings of self-importance, the space also presented less than ideal conditions under which to evaluate precious gems. He'd known that he probably could have done better elsewhere, however he'd thought it best that he be located there in the Phelan, where the trade was centered.

Julia looked thoroughly about both rooms, considered them for a long moment. “Don't fret, love,” she told Grady, “paint will do wonders, just wait and see.”

His office became her project. She didn't exclude him from it but neither did she always consult him either. She chose the paint, a bright but somewhat kind white. And the carpeting, an industrial sort but not entirely tech, gray with a small geometric black and white for the impression of texture. She saw to it that the plastering was done and that more than an adequate number of fluorescent lighting fixtures were installed, the same as she had in her studio, the kind that simulated daylight. Instead of settling for merely Levolor blinds on the two windows she added a major touch of elegance with some amply swagged portieres, edged with tassels and held back with wide matching braids. She also arranged for the leasing of office furniture, chose pieces as understated and as indestructible as possible.

Grady was overwhelmed by her enthusiastic interest. He thought it a bit strange that she should get so caught up in it. Not just involved but avidly so, to the point of appearing driven. It was as though she personally had a great deal at stake. He didn't dwell upon it or find fault but heeded his heart and easily convinced himself it was just her way of demonstrating her caring feelings for him.

Meanwhile he was buying some of the equipment he'd need, such as a Mettler PL 1000C electronic scale, a 10x to 90x Bausch & Lomb microscope and, most important, a really safe safe, an SLS12, insurance rated AAA.

The day when the office was being painted Grady arrived shortly before noon to find Doris as well as Julia up on ladders rolling it on. Doris greeted him with a warm smile but indicting eyes.

“I quit Havermeyer,” she told him.

Julia had on jeans. Doris had on a skirt, and, up on the ladder as she was, her slender, ideal legs were hardly ignorable. Grady tried to refrain from looking up as he asked, “Why? Why'd you quit?”

“I couldn't take another second of queen titless,” Doris replied, “and I figured you'd be needing someone. As a matter of fact,” she said pointedly, “I thought you'd be needing someone a lot more than you evidently do.”

Julia shot Grady a glance and a grin.

Grady told Doris, “I can't afford you.”

“That's okay, you will be able to down the road a ways and I'm willing to chance the trip. I've saved up for just this sort of opportunity.”

“You mean emergency.”

“I mean what I said,” Doris contended.

Julia liked Doris for that.

“On one condition,” Doris added for Julia's benefit, “no sexual harassment.” Feigning all business, she dipped the roller into the tray and slathered a swath onto the ceiling. Later, however, when she had the chance, she told Grady, “Some sidekick you are. I wait years for a go at you and before I can say either yes or please, you go and let someone else have her way with you.”

Grady shrugged.

“You in love with her?”

“Quite possibly.”

“I can understand why. She's nifty. But if it goes sour all I ask is you give my sugar a try. Deal?”

“Deal,” Grady said, sure it would never come to that.

So, the office was completed, all the way to the softening of corners with plants and Grady's name on the door, which Julia watched a professional sign painter do with critical interest. Still lacking were paintings for the walls and an inventory of gems.

Julia remedied the bare walls with several paintings on loan from her personal collection. All but the prime wall to the right of his desk. That was reserved, she said, for a work in progress.

As for the inventory, Grady could hardly do business without it. The most he could do was “middle” some deals, that is, find out what someone was in the market for, then, through contacts, find it, have it memoed out, put an acceptable higher price on it, and thus earn a margin.

Grady called around to people he knew in the trade. A few responded as they should have, promised to help supply Grady with some goods. Most, however, had been contacted by Harold Havermeyer, who, in his slick way, had sown the rumor that Grady had been let go because of an impropriety too despicable to mention, one so flagrant, in fact, that daughter Gayle could no longer tolerate him and had resorted to divorce. Thievery was insinuated. The most serious breach of code. “Trust him at your own risk,” were Harold's words.

As trustful as people in the gem trade tended to be it didn't take much to make them distrust. It was the nature of the business.

One morning Grady and Harold were the only passengers in an elevator at 760 Market. Harold chinned up aloofly, fixed his eyes straight ahead.

Grady couldn't resist. “Harold,” he asked, “isn't that shit on the corner of your mouth?”

Harold flushed and gritted.

Grady made fists in his pockets and got out on two.

He needed capital. Having been merely an employee of HH all those years, he had no commercial credit. He went to several banks and filled out their applications, which made him realize how unqualified he was for any sizeable loan. No collateral, no previous similar loan history, insurmountable sins according to their way of looking at it. A couple of banks, including the branch of one where he'd kept his account, were willing to extend him a high-interest, short-term personal loan of twenty thousand, but that was all.

While at his bank he removed whatever was of value from his safety-deposit box. His sunny day things was how he'd always thought of them, a little eclectic horde that he'd acquired over the years from estate sales and other opportunities. Including a set of English art nouveau gold and sapphire buttons, a ruby pendant signed by Vever, another signed by Manboussin, and still another rare and very good one signed by René Lalique, a gold coin struck by Septimius Severus to commemorate the games held in Rome in A.D. 206, a 1921 Cartier bedside clock in lavender
guilloche
enamel, an Audemars Piquet pocket watch and a circa 1850 Carlo Giuliano bracelet comprised of red and green garnets.

Grady estimated the lot was worth at least a hundred and fifty thousand. He took the pieces first to a retail dealer on Grant Avenue who specialized in such merchandise. The dealer put on the usual buying face, straight and dubious, and acted as though he was doing Grady a favor by merely looking at the things. Actually, he looked at them very carefully and his appreciation was apparent. He sternly offered seventy-five thousand, take it or leave it.

Grady surprised the man by leaving it. Walked six blocks to Pine Street and another retail dealer, a tall, snooty woman who said right off and too quickly that she liked some things and not others and was probably interested only in the Giuliano bracelet. She kept mumbling that she doubted the authenticity of most of the hallmarks and signatures although, she admitted, the Cartier clock was definitely Cartier. When she thought she'd sufficiently disparaged the goods she offered ninety thousand, and, when Grady packed up and headed out, she capitulated with a hundred and twenty-five.

Which Grady accepted.

It was a start, a good start, but more was needed, and Grady was confident that more was forthcoming.

The next Tuesday he flew to Reno and got his divorce decree. Flew back that same day and, with papers in hand, was in attorney McGuin's office early Wednesday morning. McGuin phoned Gayle's attorney and by immediate messenger provided him with a copy of the decree. The messenger returned with Harold's certified check in the amount of two hundred thousand. Grady's rightful community property, half of the equity in the Mill Valley house.

There was more than the satisfaction of money in the way Grady had caused Harold to cave in on that matter. It had to do with something Harold had pulled off seven years ago and boasted about to Grady.

Harold was a compulsive collector of fine things or at least things that appeared to be authentically fine. Sculptings, paintings, antiquities, precious
objets
and the like. As with most collectors Harold got as much enjoyment from the act of acquiring as he did from owning. Either quite soon or eventually he tired of things, be they authentic or fake.