Private places, p.27
Private Places, page 27
For one heart-stopping moment Ardelle remembered the passionate man Joseph Manning had been two years earlier, convinced that men and women could be advocates rather than adversaries.
Immediately the vision died, bringing with it the reality of the man who waited behind her.
“I attended every meeting.” She closed her eyes against the throbbing black curtain that was the corridor; pinpricks of light danced behind her lids. “I supported your every hypothesis. When you voted, I voted. When you abstained, I abstained. What more do you want from me?”
“The truth,” pierced wool and flayed her spine. “I want the truth, Miss Dennison.”
“And just which truth do you desire, Mr. Manning?” Eyelids snapping open, Ardelle compulsively swirled around in a flare of wool and bouncing bustle. Murky gray-green light splotched the boardroom. Unerringly she focused on the man who sat at the head of the conference table. He was so deeply shrouded by shadow that all she could see of him was an indistinct blur of skin topped by black hair darker than night. “Do you want to know if I regret not looking at French postcards? Or do you want to know if I regret I will lose my reputation, because the other members of the club looked at them? Or perhaps you want to know if I regret the fact that I, too, did not break the law and visit a pornographic book shop?”
“Do you?” was the harsh rejoinder.
Bitterness rose up like bile inside Ardelle’s throat. “As you so astutely reminded me, I have seen a naked man and more. I do not need to imperil my reputation by ogling obscene postcards. Nor do I need to purchase a leather phallus. I have experienced sexual coition, and quite frankly, Mr. Manning, it’s not worth discussing, let alone duplicating.”
The triumph she expected, uttering the hurtful words, did not come.
“So you felt no pleasure when you took me inside your body.”
His voice was strangely flat over the singsong whine of carriage wheels.
Cold, sticky sweat coated her palms.
She was afraid, but she did not want to be afraid.
Ardelle gripped her cloak and reticule more tightly. “I have never taken pleasure in any man.”
“Then you’re a virgin.”
She blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“Or a liar.”
Anger swelled the twilight. “You wanted the truth, Mr. Manning; I have told you the truth. I assure you, if it were in my power, I would gladly give you back your virginity.”
“But it is within your power, Miss Dennison.”
There was only one explanation for his behavior.
“You’re inebriated,” she said contemptuously.
“Not at all,” Joseph Manning replied, speaking in that strangely grating voice that did not belong to him, but which reverberated throughout her entire being. “You obviously remember the meeting in which a dildo was introduced.”
Ardelle stiffened at his deliberate use of vulgarity.
“Surely, then,” he baldly continued, “you also remember Mr. Stiles’ suggestion that it is not abstinence that makes a man or a woman virgin, but the lack of sharing pleasure. Prove to me we did not share pleasure, Miss Dennison, and you will give me back my virginity.”
“You do not believe that nonsense.”
Virginity—like innocence—could not be regained.
“Don’t I?”
What did Ardelle Dennison know of Joseph Manning? his voice implied.
“No,” she replied with conviction. He was—and always had been—a man of unquestionable intellect. “You do not.”
“I remember how slick and wet you were, Miss Dennison.”
But this evening he was not talking like a member of the intelligentsia.
Curtly Ardelle returned, “How do you know I was—”
He did not allow her to finish.
“I was inside you,” whipped the darkness. “Don’t you think a man feels a woman?”
“Yet, Mr. Manning,” she sharply riposted, “for a man who has ‘felt’ me, you seem strangely uncertain as to whether or not I took pleasure in your touch. Are you so certain it is not your memory rather than my person that provided this ‘wetness’ of which you speak?”
“No.”
A harsh sough of air punctuated the taut silence: Dimly Ardelle realized it was her breathing that she heard.
“But neither do I know it is.”
“And you want me to prove to you that my body is not affected by your touch.”
Her voice was equally harsh.
“Yes.”
“So you hoped, by luring me to this room and keeping me here after closing hours, that I would lift my skirts and grant you access to my sex.”
“If that’s the only way you can prove you do not desire me, yes.”
Ardelle struggled to hold back anger. It was emotion that made women weak. But Ardelle was not a weak woman.
“I told you I do not—”
Desire was drowned out by hard speculation: “Because I have to wonder, Miss Dennison.”
Heart beating against the cage that her corset had inexplicably become, Ardelle asked in the sneer that intimidated men, all men, young and old, single and married. “What do you wonder, Mr. Manning?”
“I have to wonder why a woman would take a man into her body if she did not desire him.”
“Perhaps I was curious to see how you would compare to my”—she could not stop the biting emphasis—“former lover.”
“I have to wonder why”—the relentless, driving voice did not falter; it was as if she had not spoken—“in the two years that the Men and Women’s Club convened, you attended every single meeting.”
“I, too, had an investment in the club,” she quickly pointed out.
“I have to wonder why every week you sat here, at the head of the table, at my side.”
Her breathing quickened. “It was the position we had agreed upon.”
“I have to wonder why you voted when I voted,” he said, deliberatelymocking the words she had earlier spoken, “and abstained when I abstained.”
“The other members looked to us for leadership,” Ardelle said forcefully, determined to make him listen to her.
But still he did not listen.
“I have to wonder, Miss Dennison, why you are standing here . . . tonight . . . in this room . . . if you do not desire to be alone with me.”
“You could have made me pregnant!” burst out of her throat.
Pregnant shot up the twenty-foot-long table upon which she had made the sacrifice that had allowed them to similarly use it two years earlier, and at which she had sat every week thereafter. Always beside him. But never with him.
Never a part of his life.
Joseph Manning did not move.
Distant chords sliced through the quivering tension: Westminster Chimes played the half hour.
The shadow of light illuminating the boardroom abruptly faded.
Night would not come at five minutes after the hour of eight, as predicted in the morning paper: It had arrived here, now, in this room where it had all started and where tonight it must inevitably end.
Feeling as brittle as the thin metal inserts reinforcing her corset, Ardelle confronted the man for whom she had risked everything, yet who now accused her of stealing from him.
“For three weeks I woke up in the grip of a nightmare, unable to breathe for fear I was with child.” His sperm had erupted inside her body, filling her womb; emotion, equally dangerous, spewed from her mouth and filled the darkness. “Did you once stop and think about the consequences of that night?”
“I would have married you.”
Ardelle could not halt the accusation: “Even though you do not find me worthy?”
The words he had uttered—I have not found a woman worthy of marriage—vibrated in the air between them, as if spoken now instead of in the disastrous meeting that had occurred forty-four days past.
Into the throbbing silence dropped the clang of a muffin man.
It was Joseph Manning who spoke first. “Those words were not directed at you.”
Ardelle’s lips curled in a cynical smile. “Were they not?”
For two years that one illicit night—no, not even a night, their entire affair had started on the strike of the quarter-hour and ended with a half-hour chime—had simmered between them, waiting for this moment of reckoning.
“There are preventive checks,” abraded her skin, the darkness a living, breathing entity that would swallow her whole if she did not soon escape.
“I am fully aware of what contraceptives are available,” Ardelle countered. “We have discussed them ad nauseam in our meetings. But we didn’t use any checks, did we? And what if we had? How many women become pregnant, despite these ‘preventive’ measures?”
“Nothing is fail-safe,” came the harsh response.
As if it were men who paid the consequences of a woman’s indiscretion.
“You are a man.” Derision spilled from her mouth while injustice squeezed her chest. The darkness that bathed Joseph Manning throbbed in time with the pulse that beat inside her eyes. “A man, I might add, who is chair of Latin at the University of London. Have you given any thought to what position I would now hold, had it been necessary for me to marry?”
Her question was rhetorical. They both knew what would happen were she forced to wed: She would become a wife and mother, with no life outside that of home and children.
It was why they had been subpoenaed: To condemn a forty-nine-year-old widow who had succumbed to the very trap Ardelle had narrowly avoided: marriage, children. Subservience to men. And Ardelle did condemn her.
She condemned the widow for having a son. She condemned the widow for suing her son.
All for sexual liberation.
“No,” pierced the emotion churning her thoughts.
“No?” Ardelle repeated on a sharp intake of breath. “Then let me educate you—”
“No,” he reiterated. “It’s not pregnancy you fear. You had a lover; you knew the risks. Yet you still took me into your body. Why?”
Memories like kaleidoscopic images flashed before her eyes.
Dripping sweat. Grunting satisfaction.
A deflated rubber condom dangling from a shrunken knob of a penis.
“Why, Mr. Manning, is it so important I take pleasure in your cock?” Ardelle deliberately parried, hurt, and angry, but she could afford to be neither. Yet it seemed she could control neither, drunk on the tension that seemed to grow with every breath they shared, inhaling darkness, expelling pain. “That is what they called it during the meeting to which you referred, is it not? A cock?” she repeated, vividly recalling the meeting in question. Every obscenity spoken—diddle, cock, jizzum—had further alienated Ardelle from the other members, each one of them so painfully innocent in their ignorance.
“Is that how you referred to your former lover’s member?” Joseph Manning unexpectedly demanded, focusing on her past rather than the vulgarity with which she had hoped to distract him.
Ardelle swallowed; she had no saliva. “One could wonder, Mr. Manning, about a man who asks for intimate details of a woman’s former lover.”
“One could wonder, Miss Dennison, about a woman who takes one man merely to compare him to another,” momentarily snatched away her breath. “Was your lover the animal to whom you referred?”
Ardelle commanded her lungs to draw in air. “You are strangely obsessed with this lover of mine.”
“And you are curiously reticent.”
“What shall I tell you?” The darkness burned her eyes, there a sliver of white shirt, there the curve of a shoulder darker than night. “That you compared favorably to him?”
“Did I?”
Ardelle was fast running out of lies.
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you get wet for him?”
Remembered pain—hard, driving—pierced her pelvis.
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you unfasten his trousers?”
Ardelle squeezed shut her eyes to block the memory of sausage-like flesh framed by black wool.
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you reach inside his small clothes and take him into your hands?”
Cold air crawled up her thighs like giant slugs.
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you steal his virginity, like you stole mine?”
THREE
Ardelle’s eyelids jerked open. “I did not steal his virginity.”
The sharp report was instantaneous. “Did he steal yours?” Heart gorging her throat, she tautly asked: “Why are you doing this?”
“I want to know why you—a woman of experience—took me into your body without benefit of a condom.”
A fingernail dug into wool, snapped on a wooden button. “Are you concerned my former lover was diseased?”
“I want to know why you wanted sex so desperately you risked pregnancy.”
“I did not want sex!” broke free of her too-tight throat.
Instantly he took advantage of her weakness, a sexual man in pursuit rather than a sexless associate in discussion. “What did you want?”
A pale glimmer shone through the darkness: A pupil.
It occurred to Ardelle that she, facing the sole window inside the boardroom, was far more visible than Joseph Manning.
“I wanted to feel you inside me,” she said tightly.
“You wanted to feel me ejaculate inside you?”
“I thought your pleasure would—”
Ardelle bit her lip to stop the damning words.
“You thought my pleasure would . . . what?” the relentless voice prompted.
A fine tremor started deep inside her stomach, everything she had ever accomplished unraveling in the deepening gloom.
“What did you think to accomplish by making me ejaculate inside you?” he pursued.
“This wouldn’t be happening,” Ardelle said, forcibly holding on to the disintegrating threads of her life, “if it weren’t for that woman.”
“Did you think to gain confidence, by demonstrating how powerless you could render me?” Joseph Manning probed.
But she could not answer without destroying that which she had worked so hard to gain.
“I sacrificed every feminine desire,” Ardelle said instead. “Every frivolous weakness.”
“Did your lover hurt you, and you hoped to take comfort from me?”
There had been no comfort in taking Joseph Manning’s sex, only an ache to explore the promise of pleasure too soon ended.
If only the Westminster Chimes had not sounded. If only the footsteps had not approached.
Then perhaps she would not now be “wet,” as he had so crudely described her, and wondering what it was she had missed out on.
“When you asked me to help you build a platform on which to hold rational and empirical discussions”—determinedly Ardelle delayed the inevitable; remembered pride swelled her breasts—“for the first time in my life, I felt like a woman who had value.”
“Did . . . your . . . lover . . . hurt . . . you?” sharply, clearly enunciated the only man Ardelle had ever wanted.
The spark of pride gave way to the coldness of reality.
Joseph Manning wanted the truth, and suddenly, knowing the consequences, Ardelle wanted to give it to him.
“He was not my lover.”
The dark silhouette, more felt than seen, remained motionless.
She took a deep, steadying breath; damp, chill air filled her lungs even as her nipples stabbed her chemise. “He was never my lover.”
“What was he then?”
Ardelle was familiar with vulgar language; no one single word existed to name what she suddenly needed to describe.
“He didn’t steal my virginity.” The coldness congesting her lungs settled inside her stomach, confessing what she had never before admitted. “I sold it.”
“For what?” it skidded down Ardelle’s spine.
“For this, Mr. Manning.” Both her mirthless smile and her sweeping arms—reticule swinging like a pendulum—were hidden by the pulsing darkness. Or perhaps not. “I sold my virginity to a sweating, grunting pig so I could become publicist to the London Museum.”
An electric current of shock rippled the air.
“To Mr. Harmon?”
The kindly, aged curator who called her “a capable woman.” But he, too, answered to a greater authority.
“No.” Ardelle’s vagina burned and stung in denial; there was no denying the truth. “The chairman of the board. I met for an interview, and he wanted me, so I gave him what he wanted. So I could have the position I wanted. I lifted my skirts, and he took me here, in this room, on this table, where I took you.”
Disbelief clouded Joseph Manning’s voice. “You took my virginity that same day he took yours?”
“I was already the publicist when we met,” Ardelle bluntly corrected.
“You took me when he dismissed you as his mistress.”
The masculine deduction was no less blunt.
“I wasn’t his mistress.” The darkness squeezed her chest until she fought to breathe. “I was his whore.”
And a whore is exactly how the chairman of the board had treated her. Once monthly for six months she had paid for her success.
“Yes.” Her voice tore through the suffocating darkness. “I took you that day he dismissed me, because he took me. He told me to bend over the table, and I did, and he—” Ardelle swallowed air; the memory remained all too vivid. Inanely she repeated, “I wanted to feel you inside me.”
“ ’Ot pies! . . .” wafted up from the street below; immediately the vendor’s cries faded into the whine of carriage wheels, a London constant, hunger and commerce.
“You told her,” broke the frigid silence permeating the boardroom. Joseph Manning referred to the woman for whom they had been subpoenaed. “When you were introduced, you said it was because of your position that we were allowed use of this boardroom. But what you really meant to say, is that it was because of your sacrifice.”
Ardelle did not pretend to misunderstand. “Yes.”
“But she didn’t understand.”
“But she should have understood,” Ardelle retorted. The childishness of her accusation singed her ears. More reasonably she added, “She sold her virginity in marriage. She knew the price women pay for position.”
