There were a number of reasons she couldn’t marry Jimmy. For openers, she was convinced that the love she felt for him was not the sort of love a woman should have for the man she would marry, whose children she would bear. He was younger than she was. And she had been his uncle’s mistress. She sometimes thought that she owed the love she felt for Jimmy simply to his likeness, in so many subtle ways, to Chesty Whittaker. Sometimes, when he looked at her, it was as if Chesty was behind the eyes.
And she didn’t reciprocate Greg’s affection, either. Greg said it jokingly, but she believed that he thought he loved her. And she didn’t want to sleep with him, either.
It would be better all around if she were a slut, she thought every so often.
Not an absolute, four-star slut, but just a little bit of a slut, like Charity Hoche.
The situation Cynthia found herself in would pose no great problems for Charity.
If Charity believed that two men like these, both of them handsome and rich, and head and shoulders above most other men, thought they were in love with her, and if she was as fond of both of them as Cynthia was, Charity would sleep with both of them. One at a time, of course, but with both of them.
“I think we should talk about Joe Garvey,” Cynthia said.
“Ellis will want to know when he calls back.”
Whittaker nodded.
“On the one hand, you need a backup for Greg,” Cynthia said, all business.
“And on the other, Joe Garvey looks and acts as if he should be working the lights for the senior play,” Whittaker said.
He walked to the bar and made himself a drink, then returned to the couch and sat down, slumped against the rear cushion, his legs stretched out straight in front of him, holding his glass on his stomach.
“He’s not trained for anything like this,” Cynthia said.
“Neither am I, according to good old Eldon Baker,” Whittaker said.
“You’re going out of your way to be difficult, aren’t you?”
“I’m about to start,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“While I was off in Merry Old England,” Whittaker said, “I was fucking a duchess.”
“For God’s sake, Jimmy!”
“Elizabeth Alexander Mary Alexandra, Her Grace the Duchess of Stanfield,” he said.
“Her family owns Whithey House. He’s in the R.A.F. Missing in action.
I’m sure there is a word for what I was doing. And it was my fault, not hers.”
He met her eyes until she averted them.
“And then, when I was in Cairo, I was fucking another married woman.
Her husband was off with Charles de Gaulle and the Free French.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Cynthia asked.
“You think it’s funny?”
“There’s a punch line,” he said.
“I don’t think I want to hear it,” she said.
“I used to ask myself, Cynthia,” Whittaker said, looking at her, “sometimes at very inappropriate moments, “Why are you doing this? If you love Cynthia, why the hell are you screwing somebody else?”” He looked at her as if he expected a response.
“No answer came, Cynthia,” he said.
“The conclusion to be drawn, therefore, is that I am an unprincipled sonofabitch.”
“Another possibility is that you don’t really love me,” she said.
“Not that way. For God’s sake, Jimmy, we have known each other since we were kids. I used to take care of you when you were a little boy.”
“I have loved you since you were about fourteen,” he said, matter-of factly
“You were climbing out of Chesty’s pool in Palm Beach, and I got a look down your bathing suit. My heart stopped, and then jumped. My heart still stops and then jumps sometimes when I look at you. What this equation means, I’m afraid, is that I do in fact love you. That way.”
“What about Garvey?” she said.
Whittaker nodded his head as if he expected not only her change of subject but even that particular question.
“She said,” he said, “changing the subject.”
He drained his drink, then stretched across the couch to put the empty glass on a table.