Chapter Twelve #4
But just maybe I do, Gray thought, when he left them that night with a firm promise to return for dinner on Friday.
And so maybe I’ll try it for a day or two, or three, he thought, calculating that it had been exactly seven days since he’d seen her, and only the Lord could make something good in that little time.
Gray never believed there could be such a thing as too many naked women.
Even now, tilting his head to the side, he decided it was that there was too much of each naked woman in sheer square yardage, rather than too many of them.
What might be piquant singly, and delightful at closer range, was definitely oppressive in paint and twelve feet high and wide.
Despite the green sylvan setting the ladies were cavorting in as they eternally molested a grinning satyr within their massive ornate gold frame above him, there was definitely too much pink and white surrounding him for his taste.
“They are something, hey what?” Gregory Archer asked with pride, “Bouguereau. Longest bar in America, too,” he said, unnecessarily gesturing toward the enormous mirrored bar they sat across from.
There were twice-life-size gilt metal nudes holding up vases near the great mirrored doors, but they, and the other nude statues and paintings, were the only females allowed through the doors of the exclusively male Hoff-man Hotel.
Still, for a club that prided itself on being so masculine, it was as preoccupied with the female form as a ladies’ Turkish bath on Saturday night would be, Gray thought, but only said, “Mmm. Mite fancy for my tastes, though. No sawdust on the floor. I don’t see the cuspidor. Where’s a man s’posed to spit?”
“If I hadn’t gone through school with you. I’d really believe you lived in a backwoods cabin,” his friend said.
“What makes you think I don’t?” Gray asked. “You never come to visit me like I visit with you when I come to town.”
His friend’s pale face colored slightly.
“Ah, well. But I don’t come to your town.
Nor will I. Not that I believe everything you say, old fellow.
But half is enough for me. I’m content to read Mark Twain, Ned Buntline, and Ted Roosevelt on the subject; the nearest I’ll get to the wild West is a Buffalo Bill show, thank you.
But don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, Grahm,” he said, pronouncing his friend’s name as an Englishman would and his fellow Americans never did.
“You read Voltaire and Plato along with the Stockman’s Journal, or whatever cow-filled paper it was you used to whoop about when you got it at school.
“But now, look at this place. Convenience, elegance…why don’t you give up your flat and come live here at Hoffman’s as I do, instead?
Ah, I know, it’s all of a piece,” he said in his best almost English accents, which amused Gray profoundly, since his own father had been an Englishman and would likely have gone into spasms of merriment—but suppressed ones, since he’d been a true gentleman—if he’d heard them, “You prefer inconvenience and hardship.”
Gray nodded, smiling, thinking of his spacious, comfortable rooms. “Sure thing. Still, I was thinking more along the lines of fun and entertainment tonight. Want to take in a show on the Bowery, like in the old days?”
“The Bowery? Too tame, by half, my friend,” Gregory scoffed.
“I think we’re both a little too old for the goings on down in Five Points now,” Gray said, “and come to think of it, it never was such fun aside from the danger of it. Rather get my head broke on the range than shot off while slumming,” he added lightly, though he remembered the desperate poverty of the ramshackle tenements, filthy streets, and wretched saloons they’d visited in their college days with no such soft emotions.
“No, no, we’re grown-up now. I’ve better plans for you,” Gregory said smugly. “I contacted Old Peachy and Fredericks, and they’re meeting us tonight. We’re going to have some real fun. Just like the old days. Come along.”
“Peachy and Fredericks,” Gray said with pleasure as he rose from his chair. “Thought they were married.”
“So they are,” Gregory said. “But what has that to do with fun?”
Gray stood with his back to the wall and watched the ball, just like a wallflower, he thought, although there were certainly no other examples of any wilting flowers here tonight.
There were floral sprays of diamonds, opals, and pearls in the ladies’ hair and at their breasts, and flowers made of feathers and lace, as well, but nothing so simple as a natural one in sight.
It was a highly dressed company. The men buttoned to their chins, in their correct black and white evening clothes, the ladies half in their brightly colored, daring, elegant, and low-cut silk and satin gowns. And all of them masked.
Gray wore a simple black silk mask; the sort, he thought, that a highwayman from another generation might have worn, since it concealed everything but his lips and chin.
He considered how odd it was that modern-day highwaymen covered what this mask concealed, since stagecoach robbers tied kerchiefs on their faces just under their eyes, instead of above them.
He was musing about that, he realized after a while, because he didn’t want to keep watching the huge dance floor.
This was, after all, a night he was supposed to be enjoying himself.
His old schoolmate. Peaches, had grown so portly that though he hugged his masked lady as close as he could as they danced, that couldn’t be as close as he’d obviously like to be; there were many portions of her that couldn’t be clutched close, and exposed as they were, Gray found himself wishing they had been.
Her gown was low in back and front, and laced so tightly she threatened to spill out of every place that Peaches’ greedy hands weren’t covering.
Dapper Gregory danced with a woman with bright red hair, although they’d both had so much to drink they seemed to be swaying in place instead of actually dancing.
But the floor was so crowded with so many people doing increasingly daring things that no one seemed to notice.
Just as no one else seemed to notice where polite, shy James Fredericks stood off in a corner of the brightly lit room.
And he, if Gray wasn’t mistaken, was already beginning to do whatever it was he regularly paid his partner, his mistress, to let him do.
Which was precisely as it was supposed to be.
The annual French Ball at the Academy of Music on fashionable Fourteenth Street had little to do with music, although it certainly was for certain fashionable gentlemen—those who wished to entertain their mistresses, or acquire new ones.
It was held masked so that no gentleman—or lady who’d come to spy or cheat on her husband—could be easily identified.
Both Fredericks and Gregory were with their mistresses, and old Peaches was looking for a new one.
He was in the right place to do it because this event was.
Gray realized, just what his father had told him they used to have in the days of his father’s youth in London: a “cyprian’s ball.
” Or as Gregory had put it, “a night for the demimonde.”
But whomever it was for, Gray thought sadly, it wasn’t for him.
It might have been that he thought his friends were too old now to embarrass themselves so openly, or because he was too old to be other than embarrassed for them now.
Because he wasn’t enjoying the watching, and he wasn’t particularly looking for anyone to participate with.
He began to look for an exit. It grieved him to leave his friends, although he began to realize that he’d lost them long since.
“Oh, fiddle. A grump. Now, now, that mustn’t be,” a light voice trilled, and Gray turned to see a blond woman in a heavily brocaded low-cut pink gown smiling at him.
Her scarlet feather mask left a pair of lovely lips bare except for their paint, and those red lips were smiling at him.
He looked at what else was bared to his gaze, and then, shrugging, let her lead him on to the dance floor.
There was a long lonely night lying ahead of him, after all.
“We match,” she said triumphantly, and at first he thought she was talking about how well they fit together.
Because her breasts, thrust up by her tightly laced bodice, felt wonderfully good against him, even through his stiff starched white shirt, vest, and jacket.
As did the rest of the womanly body pressed so close against his own, pressing ever closer when she felt the sudden involuntary response she’d won from him.
“Our hair, silly,” she trilled, when he didn’t answer. “We’re two of a kind.”
She leaned in to him as they danced, closer than he’d believed a waltz could be danced in public; as close, he thought with mild amusement to temper the startling fact of his body’s growing desire, as he’d been with some women he’d held for far more intimate embraces.
Although, he decided as she attempted the impossibility of moving closer, it obviously wouldn’t take long before he could take her in that closer one if he wished to.
Bemused, he let her maneuver him to a less crowded corner, where she swiftly, as deftly as she’d later be pleased to remove his trousers, untied his mask and slid it off his face. She took in her breath.
“Ooo,” she cooed, “Look what I’ve got!”
And then masked his face with her own.
Her lips were wet, warm, and hungry. His hand began to rise, as if of its own accord, to take all that was being pressed on him, when he felt instead, a surge of self-disgust strong enough to shrivel his lust. He stepped back.
He gazed down into the glittering gloom where her eyes would be if they weren’t shadowed by her mask, and was glad he couldn’t see them as clearly as he’d seen himself in that moment.
Those he’d scorned tonight had at least acted through honest lust. He, he realized, had acted from boredom and proceeded through habit.
But it wasn’t only that. It was what he’d almost been seduced by in that moment.
She was only just what he’d had in his arms. Breasts, hair, and lips.
He’d a strange memory of what they might have done together, as though it had already happened, although he’d never done precisely this before.
Still, now it seemed to him he’d done it far too many times before, and her masked face was sadly apt, symbolic of all he’d ever known intimately with a woman.
And while that had been enough for him until now, it wasn’t what he’d come to New York to have.
No, nor was it what Josh, or Royal, or any man he respected had.
He didn’t want to be fobbed off again, not even for an hour, deceived by his body into betraying his heart.
He’d enough of anonymous female bodies, like the ones on the Hoffman Hotel walls, or any of these at the French Ball.
“Something I said?” she inquired pertly.
“Something you didn’t,” he sighed, touching his fingers to her cheek in regretful farewell.
He bowed and left the ballroom. And strode out into the night, through the boisterous streets filled with the exiting revelers, through quieter sleeping sectors of town, to walk his lust away all the way from fashionable New York to his outpost of a temporary home at the northern edges of the city.
He was accosted by the myriad prostitutes who patrolled the nighttime streets, but as he’d already refused a better class of one, he’d no difficulty discouraging others.
But even after all that exercise in a dampening wind that set his bad leg to thrumming, and after a thorough sluicing with cool water in his bath, his lust remained with him as he tried to sleep.
Because it had never been for the anonymous blond female.
He knew all too well who it was he wanted.
And knowing it was more complicated than lust, stayed up hours more wondering what it was that she wanted that he could offer her.