Then she showed me the smallest measure of these powers, plucking hairs from my head, one by one. Only a dozen; just to demonstrate her formidable skills. I felt them going. She just said: one from behind your ear, and I'd feel my skin creep and then jump as fingers of her volition snatched a hair out. Then another, and another. It was an incredible display; she had this power down to a fine art, locating and withdrawing single hairs from my scalp with the precision of tweezers.
Frankly, I was sitting there rigid with fear, knowing that she was just toying with me. Sooner or later, I was certain the time would be right for her to silence me permanently.
But she had doubts about herself. She told me how the skill, though she had honed it, scared her. She needed, she said, someone to teach her how to use it best. And I was not that somebody. I was just a man who loved her, who had loved her before this revelation, and would love her still, in spite of it.
In fact, after that display I quickly came to accommodate a new vision of Jacqueline. Instead of fearing her, I became more devoted to this woman who tolerated my possession of her body.
My work became an irritation, a distraction that came between me and thinking of my beloved. What reputation I had began to deteriorate; I lost briefs, I lost credibility. In the space of two or three months my professional life dwindled away to almost nothing. Friends despaired of me, colleagues avoided me.
It wasn't that she was feeding on me. I want to be clear about that. She was no lamia, no succubus. What happened to me, my fall from grace with ordinary life if you like, was of my own making. She didn't bewitch me; that's a romantic lie to excuse rape. She was a sea: and I had to swim in her. Does that make any sense? I'd lived my life on the shore, in the solid world of law, and I was tired of it. She was liquid; a boundless sea in a single body, a deluge in a small room, and I will gladly drown in her, if she grants me the chance. But that was my decision. Understand that. This has always been my decision. I have decided to go to the room tonight, and be with her one final time. That is of my own free will.
And what man would not? She was (is) sublime.
For a month after that demonstration of power I lived in a permanent ecstasy of her. When I was with her she showed me ways to love beyond the limits of any other creature on God's earth. I say beyond the limits: with her there were no limits. And when I was away from her the reverie continued: because she seemed to have changed my world.
Then she left me.
I knew why: she'd gone to find someone to teach her how to use strength. But understanding her reasons made it no easier.
I broke down: lost my job, lost my identity, lost the few friends I had left in the world. I scarcely noticed. They were minor losses, beside the loss of Jacqueline..."
"Jacqueline."
My God, she thought, can this really be the most influential man in the country? He looked so unprepossessing, so very unspectacular. His chin wasn't even strong.
But Titus Penifer was power.
He ran more monopolies than he could count; his word in the financial world could break companies like sticks, destroying the ambitions of hundreds, the careers of thousands. Fortunes were made overnight in his shadow, entire corporations fell when he blew on them, casualties of his whim. This man knew power if any man knew it. He had to be learned from.
"You wouldn't mind if I called you J., would you?"
"No."
"Have you been waiting long?"
"Long enough."
"I don't normally leave beautiful women waiting."
"Yes you do."
She knew him already: two minutes in his presence was enough to find his measure. He would come quickest to her if she was quietly insolent.
"Do you always call women you've never met before by their initials?"
"It's convenient for filing; do you mind?"
"It depends."
"On what?"
"What I get in return for giving you the privilege."
"It's a privilege, is it, to know your name?"
"Yes."
"Well... I'm flattered. Unless of course you grant that privilege widely?"
She shook her head. No, he could see she wasn't profligate with her affections.
"Why have you waited so long to see me?" he said. "Why have I had reports of your wearing my secretaries down with your constant demands to meet with me? Do you want money? Because if you do you'll go away empty-handed. I became rich by being mean, and the richer I get, the meaner I become."
The remark was truth; he spoke it plainly.
"I don't want money," she said, equally plainly.
"That's refreshing."
"There's richer than you."
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. She could bite, this beauty.
"True," he said. There were at least half a dozen richer men in the hemisphere.
"I'm not an adoring little nobody. I haven't come here to screw a name. I've come here because we can be together. We have a great deal to offer each other."
"Such as?" he said.
"I have my body."
He smiled. It was the straightest offer he'd heard in years.
"And what do I offer you in return for such largesse?"
"I want to learn —"
"Learn?"
"— how to use power."
She was stranger and stranger, this one.
"What do you mean?" he replied, playing for time. He hadn't got the measure of her; she vexed him, confounded him.
"Shall I recite it for you again, in bourgeois?" she said, playing insolence with such a smile he almost felt attractive again.
"No need. You want to learn to use power. I suppose I could teach you —"
"I know you can."
"You realize I'm a married man. Virginia and I have been together eighteen years."
"You have three sons, four houses, a maid-servant called Mirabelle. You loathe New York, and you love Bangkok; your shirt collar is 16½, your favourite colour green."
"Turquoise."
"You're getting subtler in your old age."
"I'm not old."
"Eighteen years a married man. It ages you prematurely."
"Not me."
"Prove it."
"How?"
"Take me."
"What?"
"Take me."
"Here?"
"Draw the blinds, lock the door, turn off the computer terminal, and take me. I dare you."
"Dare?"
How long was it since anyone had dared him to do anything?
"Dare?"
He was excited. He hadn't been so excited in a dozen years. He drew the blinds, locked the door, turned off the video display of his fortunes.
My God, she thought, I've got him.
It wasn't an easy passion, not like that with Vassi. For one thing, Pettifer was a clumsy, uncultured lover. For another, he was too nervous of his wife to be a wholly successful adulterer. He thought he saw Virginia everywhere: in the lobbies of the hotels they took a room in for the afternoon, in cabs cruising the street outside their rendezvous, once even (he swore the likeness was exact) dressed as a waitress, and swabbing down a table in a restaurant. All fictional fears, but they dampened the spontaneity of the romance somewhat.
Still, she was learning from him. He was as brilliant a potentate as he was inept a lover. She learned how to be powerful without exercising power, how to keep one's self uncontaminated by the foulness all charisma stirs up in the uncharismatic; how to make the plain decisions plainly; how to be merciless. Not that she needed much education in that particular quarter. Perhaps it was more truthful to say he taught her never to regret her absence of instinctive compassion, but to judge with her intellect alone who deserved extinction and who might be numbered amongst the righteous.