“I’ll just have the wine,” she said. “I can’t really stay for lunch.”
“You came all the way uptown for a glass of wine?”
She looked him in the eye. “It hasn’t been going well, Stone, you and I.”
“Funny, I thought it was going extremely well,” he replied.
“You would think that,” she said. “Fact is, I don’t like sneaking around so the other lawyers I deal with won’t know; I don’t like recusing myself from your cases and not being able to say why; and good sex isn’t enough.”
“I thought we had more going than sex,” he said.
“I thought so, too, for a while, but I was wrong. We meet each other’s needs, to a point, and that point ends right after sex.”
“You’ve met somebody, haven’t you?”
She shrugged.
“Haven’t you?”
“All right, I have; actually, it’s somebody I’ve known for a long time but am getting to know better.”
“It’s the real thing?”
“I don’t know about that yet. It might be, if I can devote some time to it.”
Stone nodded. “And I’m using up a lot of time.”
“You’re using up a lot of me, Stone, and I’m not getting enough back.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry; you’ve always been straight with me. I know you don’t have any interest in marriage, and I thought that was okay, but it’s just not. I need something in my life with a future. I’m thirty-four, and I want kids before I’m forty.”
“I can understand that,” Stone said into his wine glass.
“Not really,” she said. “It’s just not something you can empathize with. You’re a sweet man, Stone, in lots of ways, but deep down inside you’re very… contained. I almost said cold, but that would be a bum rap. You’re just not… easy to reach. I’m probably not the first woman to tell you something like that.”
Stone shrugged. He didn’t want to confirm it, but she was right. “So, who’s the guy?”
“Tom Bill.”
“Judge Thomas Bill?”
“Right. Don’t worry, I won’t ever tell him about us. He’s the jealous type, and he could make your life miserable in court.”
“That he could. What about you? Are you going to make my life miserable?”
“Not in court,” she said, allowing herself a small smile. “You’ll be miserable later, when you figure out what you’ve lost.”
“I’m already miserable,” he said.
“Not really, but you will be. That’ll be my little revenge for your not taking me seriously.”
“I always took you seriously.”
“Not seriously enough.” She shrugged. “Your loss.”
“My loss,” he agreed.
She sighed. “Well, that’s about it, I guess.”
“Sure you don’t want some lunch?”
“I’m due back in court at two; I’d better get going.” She stood up.
He stood up with her, at a loss for words.
“See you in court,” she said, and left.
Stone sat quietly, staring at the tablecloth.
A waiter approached. “The lady won’t be lunching?” he asked.
“The lady won’t be lunching.”
“And what would you like, Mr. Barrington?”
“Sometimes I wonder that myself,” Stone replied.
Chapter 14
On Friday evening Amanda stood naked before her dressing room mirror and regarded her body. She had exercised her whole life, and never more regularly than during the past ten years. The effort showed in her trim figure; what few defects had appeared with age she had had adjusted – a little off the tops of the thighs, a slight lifting and augmentation of the breasts, and she was not all that different from the girl she had been at eighteen, during her first year at Barnard.
She had been born Ida Louise Erenheim in Delano, Georgia, to a father and mother who had both worked their whole lives at Delano Mills, one of a group owned by the prominent Delano family of Atlanta, who had founded her home town and for whom it had been named. The girl’s earliest memories were of her mother picking lint from her hair after a ten-hour day among the looms.
Ida Louise had discovered early the importance of her beauty, at first to the girls who were her social betters in the town and later to the boys from the better families. She had also been a very bright child, good in school and mature beyond her years. At a time when her girlfriends were giggling about sex at pajama parties, Ida Louise had been enthusiastically practicing it in various back seats, usually of Cadillacs and Lincolns. Word had quickly spread among the richer boys that Ida Louise responded well to shows of wealth.
By the time her girlfriends were thinking of offering up their virginity, Ida Louise had acquired a sexual repertoire that had astonished a number of athletic stars and one teacher. The teacher had filled out her scholarship application for Barnard and written his proposal letter while she had knelt under his desk and fellated him to higher flights of endorsement. Shortly after she had foolishly confided this incident to an athlete lover, she had found herself trapped in a locker room with the first string, and, faced with gang rape, had decided to enjoy the experience. She had, indeed, enjoyed it right up to the moment when they had beaten her senseless and left her naked and battered on the cold cement floor, to be discovered by a janitor, who had called the coach. The business had been hushed up, and Ida Louise had missed giving her valedictory address at graduation, departing early for New York and Barnard, caring not who saw her bruises in the day coach of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. For the rest of her life, the smell of sweaty athletic clothing would cause her to have unreasoning panic attacks. She had never again entered any sort of locker room, preferring to exercise outdoors or at home. The event had, though, instilled in her the iron determination that for the rest of her life it would be she who controlled every aspect of her sex life. She had made the mistake of allowing someone else to do that, and she would never make that mistake again.
Her first act on arriving in New York had been to find a lawyer and legally change her name to Amanda Delano, which name her cooperating high school teacher had already placed in her school records and scholarship application. Amanda had a much nicer ring than Ida Louise, and thereafter she had not disabused her college friends from thinking that she was one of the mill-owning Atlanta Delanos.
At Barnard, Amanda had remained celibate for a year while pouring her sexual frustration into her studies and the school newspaper, for which she wrote a column on campus social life. When she could no longer tolerate a life without sex, she began to seek out older, often married men – assistant professors, usually, who demanded no full-time relationship and who could recommend her for the best classes and teachers. After graduation from Barnard she got a job on the old Journal-American and, very soon afterward, began an affair with a forty-year-old assistant managing editor, one Robert Dart, who she knew was headed for a top job at the paper. Within a year he had promoted her twice, given her her own column, and divorced his wife of fifteen years to marry Amanda.
The marriage was hell for both of them, but it had ended well for Amanda when Bob Dart had dropped dead on a squash court and left her his name, a cooperative apartment in a good neighborhood, and two hundred thousand dollars in life insurance. She had hardly been set for life, but now she had a career, a certain respect as the widow of a well-known journalist, and, above all, the column. When the Journal-American had folded, Dick Hickock’s predecessor had recruited her and syndicated the column. Amanda Delano Dart had made herself powerful.
Amanda pulled on a pair of stockings and secured them to her garter belt. Her legs were too long for most pantyhose, and she felt somehow more alluring in a garter belt anyway. She slipped silk panties over the stockings and stepped into a short, low-cut black dress from her favorite, Chanel, that showed off both her good legs and her firm breasts. She needed no bra, and with the twitch of a shoulder she could give a properly attentive man a glimpse of nipple. A pair of black alligator Ferragamos and a modest diamond necklace and earrings completed her outfit.