“Well, baby,” he said aloud, and laid a square, thick-fingered hand on the young woman’s bare knee.
Through half-closed eyelids, Miss Maunciple gave him a secret and somehow indecent look of understanding and complicity; then uttered a little laugh and stretched her arms. “Doesn’t the sun feel good!” she said; and, closing her lids completely, she lowered her raised arms, clasped her hands behind her neck and threw back her shoulders. It was a pose that lifted the breasts, that emphasized the inward curve of the loins and the contrary swell of the buttocks—the sort of pose that a new arrival in the seraglio would be taught by the eunuchs to assume at her first interview with the sultan; the very pose, Jeremy recognized, as he had chanced to look her way, of that quite particularly unsuitable statue on the third floor of the Beverly Pantheon.
Through his dark glasses, Mr. Stoyte looked up at her with an expression of possessiveness at once gluttonous and paternal. Virginia was his baby, not only figuratively and colloquially, but also in the literal sense of the word. His sentiments were simultaneously those of the purest father-love and the most violent eroticism.
He looked up at her. By contrast with the shiny white satin of her breech clout and brassière the sunburnt skin seemed more richly brown. The planes of the young body flowed in smooth continuous curves, effortlessly solid, three-dimensional without accent or abrupt transition. Mr. Stoyte’s regard travelled up to the auburn hair and came down by way of the rounded forehead, of the wide-set eyes, and small, straight, impudent nose to the mouth. That mouth—it was her most striking feature. For it was to the mouth’s short upper lip that Virginia’s face owed its characteristic expression of child-like innocence—an expression that persisted through all her moods, that was noticeable whatever she might be doing, whether it was telling smutty stories or making conversation with the Bishop, taking tea in Pasadena or getting tight with the boys, enjoying what she called “a bit of yum-yum” or attending Mass.
Chronologically, Miss Maunciple was a young woman of twenty-two; but that abbreviated upper lip gave her, in all circumstances, an air of being hardly adolescent, of not having reached the age of consent. For Mr. Stoyte, at sixty, the curiously perverse contrast between childishness and maturity, between the appearance of innocence and the fact of experience, was intoxicatingly attractive. It was not only so far as he was concerned that Virginia was both kinds of baby; she was also both kinds of baby objectively, in herself.
Delicious creature! The hand that had lain inert, hitherto, upon her knee slowly contracted. Between the broad spatulate thumb and the strong fingers, what smoothness, what a sumptuous and substantial resilience!
“Jinny,” he said. “My baby!”
The baby opened her large blue eyes and dropped her arms to her sides. The tense back relaxed, the lifted breasts moved downwards and forwards like soft living creatures sinking to repose. She smiled at him.
“What are you pinching me for, Uncle Jo?”
“I’d like to eat you,” her Uncle Jo replied in a tone of cannibalistic sentimentality.
“I’m tough.”
Mr. Stoyte uttered a maudlin chuckle. “Little tough kid!” he said.
The tough kid stooped down and kissed him.
Jeremy Pordage who had been quietly looking at the panorama and continuing his silent recitation of Epipsychidion, happened at this moment to turn once more in the direction of the couch and was so much embarrassed by what he saw that he began to sink and had to strike out violently with arms and legs to prevent himself from going under. Turning round in the water, he swam to the ladder, climbed out and, without waiting to dry himself, hurried to the elevator.
“Really,” he said to himself as he looked at the Vermeer. “Really!”
“I did some business this morning,” said Mr. Stoyte when the baby had straightened herself up again.
“What sort of business?”
“Good business,” he answered. “Might make a lot of money. Real money,” he insisted.
“How much?”
“Maybe half a million,” he said cautiously understating his hopes; “maybe a million; maybe even more.”
“Uncle Jo,” she said, “I think you’re wonderful.” Her voice had the ring of complete sincerity. She genuinely did think him wonderful. In the world in which she had lived it was axiomatic that a man who could make a million dollars must be wonderful. Parents, friends, teachers, newspapers, radio, advertisements—explicitly or by implication, all were unanimous in proclaiming his wonderfulness. And besides, Virginia was very fond of her Uncle Jo. He had given her a wonderful time, and she was grateful. Besides, she liked to like people if she possibly could; she liked to please them. Pleasing them made her feel good—even when they were elderly, like Uncle Jo, and when some of the ways in which she was called upon to please them didn’t happen to be very appetizing. “I think you’re wonderful,” she repeated.
Her admiration gave him an intense satisfaction. “Oh, it’s quite easy,” he said with hypocritical modesty, angling for more.
Virginia gave it him. “Easy, nothing!” she said firmly. “I say you are wonderful. So just keep your mouth shut.”
Enchanted, Mr. Stoyte took another handful of firm flesh and squeezed it affectionately. “I’ll give you a present, if the deal goes through,” he said. “What would you like, baby?”
“What would I like?” she repeated. “But I don’t want anything.”
Her disinterestedness was not assumed. For it was true; she never did want things this way, in cold blood. At the moment a want occurred, for an ice cream soda, for example, for a bit of yum-yum, for a mink coat seen in a shop window—at such moments, she did want things, and wanted them badly, couldn’t wait to have them. But as for long-range wants, wants that had to be thought about in advance—no, she never had wanted like that. The best part of Virginia’s life was spent in enjoying the successive instants of present contentment of which it was composed; and if ever circumstances forced her out of this mindless eternity into the world of time, it was a narrow little universe in which she found herself, a world whose farthest boundaries were never more than a week or two away in the future. Even as a show-girl, at eighteen dollars a week, she had found it difficult to bother much about money and security and what would happen if you had an accident and couldn’t show your legs any more. Then Uncle Jo had come along, and everything was there, as though it grew on trees—a swimming-pool tree, a cocktail tree, a Schia-parelli tree. You just had to reach out your hand and there it was, like an apple in the orchard, back home in Oregon. So where did presents come in? Why should she want anything? Besides, it was obvious that Uncle Jo got a tremendous kick out of her not wanting things; and to be able to give Uncle Jo a kick always made her feel good. “I tell you, Uncle Jo, I don’t want anything”
“Don’t you?” said a strange voice, startlingly close behind them. “Well, I do.”
Dark-haired and dapper, glossily Levantine, Dr. Sig-mund Obispo stepped briskly up to the side of the couch.
“To be precise,” he went on, “I want to inject one-point-five cubic centimetres of testosterone into the great man’s gluteus medius. So off you go, my angel,” he said to Virginia in a tone of derision, but with a smile of unabashed desire. “Hop!” He gave her a familiar little pat on the shoulder and another, when she got up to make room for him, on the white satin posterior.
Virginia turned round sharply, with the intention of telling him not to be so fresh; then, as her glance travelled from that barrel of hairy flesh which was Mr. Stoyte to the other’s handsome face, so insultingly sarcastic and at the same time so flatteringly concupiscent, she changed her mind and, instead of telling him, loudly, just where he got off, she made a grimace and stuck out her tongue at him. What was begun as a rebuke had ended, before she knew it, as the acquiescence in an impertinence, as an act of complicity with the offender and of disloyalty to Uncle Jo. Poor Uncle Jo! she thought, with a rush of affectionate pity for the old gentleman. For a moment she felt quite ashamed of herself. The trouble, of course, was that Dr. Obispo was so handsome; that he made her laugh; that she liked his admiration; that it was fun to lead him on and see how he’d act. She even enjoyed getting mad at him, when he was rude, which he constantly was.
“I suppose you think you’re Douglas Fairbanks, Junior,” she said, making an attempt to be scathing; then walked away with as much
