He wanted to do it, wanted to very badly, but he couldn’t bring himself to inflict it on her, particularly as the years went by.
“It—it just isn’t going to work, Angelique. I do have lusts, and I’m going to have a hard time dealing with them, even harder if I am always with you. Besides, I have no stomach for the rich life. I’d just get fat and lazy and vegetate, while you would want and deserve the glamor of the world. And eventually you would want what I can’t give you, and I’d want it, too. What would we do in that honeymoon suite? Have some kind of two way dildo sent up from the local sex shop?”
She stopped and frowned. “What is this ‘dildo?’ ”
He told her, and she laughed again. “That sounds interesting. By all means we must try it!” Suddenly the laugh faded, and she grew almost somber. I think you truly do not love me, then. Is it the money? I will give it all away. I have never had need of it before. Oui. I will give it away. We will start clean. And if your pride demands it, I will stay home and be the good little wife and clean and mend.”
“No, my pride doesn’t demand that. I just—can’t—see how it’ll work out.”
“Then I give it all away anyway. I return to Quebec and take my vows. Without you, without your support, your friendship, your love, the rest is meaningless.”
He grabbed her suddenly. “You’re really serious?”
“I am more than serious. I will do it. I will marry either you or Christ within the week.”
He sighed. “I guess you’ll have to marry me, then. But keep some of the money. We’re going to need competent security for the rest of our lives, I’m afraid, and that costs. Besides, if I ever needed to find a job, I couldn’t pass the physical.”
She smiled broadly and threw her arms around him.
“Come, Gregory Mac Donald! I will show you how serious I am, and how much you failed to learn through all this!”
Many on the staff and otherwise did not approve of it, but her chief psychiatrist thought it was the best thing for both of them and helped. When you’re rich, what you want comes to you, including a magistrate and a pre-filled out marriage license and all the rest. Arrangements were also quickly made to sneak them past the waiting press and off to a private, well secured resort for the very rich on an isolated stretch of the Grand Cayman Islands. There, in a luxury condominium overlooking the ocean, unobtrusively protected by a security system and staff he himself designed, they were finally able to feel a measure of peace and relaxation.
MacDonald pretty much was along for the ride. He was washed up as a lover and even as a good socialist, yet he found himself surprisingly happy. He remembered his files, and his ex-wife’s own evaluation, that he was the ultimate egocentric personality, and he realized with a start that he had changed far more than physically. He was no longer the sun, but a world in orbit around a different sun, that of Angelique. For the first time, he needed someone else to give him purpose and meaning, and it wasn’t a terrible condition at all.
And now a three-quarters moon was rising above a darkened sea, and as they stood hand in hand at the doors to the balcony of the luxury suite, they held hands and comtemplated their first really private moments together after all of this. In a sense, he’d been dreading, even putting off this moment, when they were alone together.
“Are you happy, my darling?” she asked him.
“Yes, in a crazy kind of way, I think I am. Something dear was taken from my body, but, the funny thing is, something else was added in my head, something that had always been missing but I hadn’t known it before. For the first time, I care about the victims.”
“What?”
“Don’t ask me to explain it. I can’t. I think Bishop Whitely understood it, though. I think that’s what he was trying to tell me at the end.”
“He—came to you on the rock?”
“Yes. And you, too, I understand. You want to tell me what he said?’’
“He said—love, and faith, and sacrifice were costs, but that they were why, up to now, we’d always won. He said that someone who kept love in their heart and faith in God and man would find any sacrifice a mere trifle. He said that I was saved by faith and sacrifice, and that I had now to carry on the love against which Hell itself could not stand, and that if I looked within myself there was no problem I could not overcome.”
He kissed her, and that, at least, was the same, and he even felt a tingling sensation in the right area of the groin. She removed his clothing slowly, and then her own, and they embraced again, and hands felt each other’s strangely identical parts. The room was dark, except for the light from the moon and a few street lamps below.
And, suddenly, Angelique knew exactly what to do and how to do it.
She closed her eyes and whispered, not to him, “Unab sequabab ciemi!”
There was a sudden rush of warm air all about them, although the balcony door was mostly closed and the room was air conditioned. He felt the sudden presence of others in the air of the room and all around, but there was nothing he could see or sense, and he stiffened, not knowing quite what to expect.
“Father of all, angel of nature, spirits of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, harken, for the Mother has found her perfect lover,” she continued in the strange language of the Hapharsi. “Let that lover be filled with the soul of the he-lion and the bull, that I may be serviced and have release.’” It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real, but it sure felt real, and if anything, even bigger and better than it was. He felt a sudden surge of pure animal energy, and he made love to her in the way he wanted to through half the night.
And yet, when they awoke, late in the afternoon, they both were as they had been. There was no mistaking the reason for the radiance of her expression and the softness of her manner, and he, too, felt satisfied, and remembered it all clearly. He was sure that, somehow, he’d made love to her, as a whole man, over and over, for a longer and more satisfying period than he ever had before with a woman, and that all had been—well, normal.
She kissed him playfully. “Do you still worry, my love?”
“Yeah. Am I going nuts—or what?”
“Magic isn’t good, or evil, it just is,” she told him. “Like everything else in this world, it can be good or evil depending on who uses it and for what purpose. That goes for spells, and—computers.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Don’t start with the ‘buts,’ my love. The magic doesn’t work as well with ‘buts.’ And don’t be so afraid. There’s nothing to fear. They made me a Hapharsi Mu’uhquah for their own evil ends, but make me one they did. It doesn’t matter what I look like or who I am—it’s there, particularly in the dark. The ancient priestesses, to preserve their virginity and thus their power, took female lovers, but most of them still craved, at least occasionally, what they could not have. Sometimes as the male, sometimes as the female, they had it better and more often than the tribe. That’s why they never succumbed to temptations of the bisexual flesh.”
“Then—it was an illusion?” He’d known it, but it had been so good, so real.
She shook her head in disgust. “After all we have been through, you and I, you can worry about what is real and what is illusion? The world is a magic place, my darling, if you wish it to be, if you believe that it is. Who is to say where reality ends and illusion begins? Who cares?”