Susan Johnson - Hot Streak

He almost stopped midthrust, but his own pulsing tide was already racing toward a shattering climax and the threat of hell itself couldn't have stopped it. Buried deep inside her, he poured himself into her trembling warmth, and while she sighed in abandoned pleasure, he whispered, “No.”

Juliana was infinitely more persuasive than a novice courtesan had any right to be and, before long, Bernadotte found himself upstairs in bed, sipping chilled champagne. She had a natural proclivity for pleasure, and since it was too late to retract the first offering of his lust, he decided you can only hang once.

They spent the afternoon in bed, the evening as well, and he said, “Enough,” before she did. “I'm not seventeen, puss, and that's all I can do for you today.”

Her warm tongue and soft lips put the lie to that pronouncement, several times more… but it was the phone that put an end to the hours of lovemaking. Her brother, it seemed, needed her to negotiate with one of his overwrought mistresses. When a crashing noise and a few heated comments vibrated across the wires, she agreed to come home and soothe the distraught woman.

Her driver was asleep in the car, but he came awake amiably. She had Bernadotte driven home first. “Call me,” she said when they arrived at his lodgings. She kissed him lightly on his lean, tanned cheek.

“If I stay,” he replied, brushing his fingertip gently across her bruised mouth.

“I'm going to have your baby, so you really should call.”

There was no suitable answer to her startlingly cheerful statement, so he simply said, “Thank you for a lovely day, Juliana.” Then he opened the door and walked away.

He didn't call, of course. He very sensibly left Baltimore the following day.

T hat summer, Bernadotte found a place like home. A landscape so similar to his ancestral country that he bought five thousand acres outright. He took Kirsti's picture with him the day after the purchase was completed, lifted it to the pine and birch forests and the rocky granite hills, and said, “We're home, sweetheart. At last.”

His workmen had finished the masonry of the small country house and were beginning the interior plastering when Juliana called in August.

“Your child is due in January.” Her voice was sunny, just as he remembered it.

After a grimace of astonishment there was a short silence while he weighed his wishes against his obligations. “Where would you like the wedding?” he asked.

“Baltimore,” she said. “Do you mind if it's large?”

There was an infinitesimal pause this time, and then he answered, “No, of course not. Whatever suits you.”

“Do you have a guest list?” she inquired.

“No,” he said.

“Is Friday next all right?”

He briefly looked at the calendar on his desk near the phone, glanced around the unfinished room, thought something like this couldn't possibly be happening to him when he'd found peace at last, and quietly answered, “Friday next is fine.”

They were married on a sultry August day before every friend and relative Juliana's family had ever known. Everyone at the reception agreed that:

Juliana looked radiant-considering…

Count Fersten was remarkably charming-considering…

And if the marriage lasted a year, it would be four months longer than anyone expected.

Extra workmen were hired to speed the completion of the house and stables in order to accommodate Bernadotte's growing family. Juliana adored her husband with a young girl's worship which, while flattering, was unnerving. They were, however, extremely compatible in bed.

When Charles was born, Bernadotte was pleased to find that his wife's smothering affection was easily transferred to her son. And it was with great relief that he found he'd taken on the less demanding role of “father” in Juliana's life now that her loving attention was focused on her baby.

They outlasted the speculators in Baltimore who'd predicted a swift demise of their marriage. Juliana stayed at his country estate for three years, although she traveled often with Charles to her homes in Baltimore and Palm Beach. Despite Bernadotte's preference for his hermitage near the Canadian border, he found his new family warm and loving.

When Charles was three, Juliana decided that she and her son were better off on their own. The separation was amiable, and Bernadotte extended an open invitation to return for visits. Charles spent his summers with his father, while Bernadotte traveled to Palm Beach for Christmas each year.

Their son grew into a sturdy youngster, assured of his parents' love and support. However, he had inherited the taint of wildness bred through generations of Ferstens. In the middle of his senior year Charles was expelled from the sixth in a line of prep schools when it became clear that his boyish pranks were motivated by a dangerous compulsion for lawlessness.

After Charles's latest escapade, Juliana called Bernadotte. “He needs a man's touch now, dear,” she said. “I can't control him. Would you mind?”

He didn't mind, of course. He doted on his only child, by now a rangy, big-boned youth whose whipcord body hadn't quite caught up to his growth. So when Charles returned to his father in disgrace yet again, Bernadotte said that first evening after dinner, “I won't say you shouldn't have done all those things at school, Charles, and I understand nonconformity. But the escapades have worried your mother. I'd appreciate,” he gently admonished, “if you could put these rebellious high jinks into some kind of proportion.”

“There's too many rules, Father. I can't stand it,” said Charles, a maverick by deepest instinct.

“Living here will eliminate most of the rules,” his father assured him. “If you remember to act like a gentleman and have respect for other people's feelings, I won't expect much more.”

And with responsibility on his own youthful shoulders, Carey, as his mother called him-a family diminutive for Carrville males-developed a grudging maturity. As his parents' son, he was a naturally skilled rider. Under his father's guidance he began taking an active interest in the Fersten stables. A tutor was brought in to finish out the last few months of school, and then Carey entered his first European steeplechase event. It was too much for a young boy. He won and won and won, and at eighteen the adulation overwhelmed him. In December his father brought him home to recuperate; he'd been living on nerves and liquor for the last month.

Although barely eighteen, he'd seen much of the world and indulged his senses past prudence for a long time, more so lately with the hedonistic partying accompanying the race circuit. Women were interested in a winner-and a rich, handsome winner increased the offerings to dizzying proportions. He was worn out, worn down in body and spirit. Pleasure had somehow lost its fine edge.

It can happen at any age, the questioning… What is happiness? What sustains it? How is it measured? Or would satisfaction be a plainer word for a plainer world?

His spirits at low ebb, Carey came back to the States at a time when newscasts were pressing home the need to save a small Asian country struggling toward democracy. The first U.S. war fought on television showed young children dying before the viewer's eyes, depicted old, helpless people displaced from their lifelong homes, pitilessly presented footage of entire villages disappearing under napalm attacks. The politicians were talking then about “the light at the end of the tunnel,” and Carey felt a surge of the spirit that had called his father and his father's father and countless Ferstens from the days of medieval baronies to fight other peoples' wars. Instead of resting, Carey impetuously joined the marines, a spontaneous decision based on a fugitive combination of melancholy, youthful idealism, and remembered stories of Fersten ancestors who had fought through a thousand years of Europe's history.

He may not have taken so drastic a step had his life been less off course. But the decision didn't seem drastic at the time; it seemed as if he'd been handed an opportunity to do something more significant than proving one's skill as an athlete on and off the course. He told himself it was wise to at least make his own choice by enlisting at a time when the draft was hot on the heels of eighteen-year-olds without deferments. But he realized the flaw in that rationalization: Generals' sons weren't fighting this war, nor were senators' sons or rich men's sons. He wouldn't have had to go. But, brooding and moody, with an elusive desire to test himself and somehow help in the tragedy five thousand miles away, Carey Fersten joined up. At the time he thought of himself as another Fersten male going off to war, another generation. There was pride in that.

When he came back from Vietnam two years later, the boyishness was gone and his bright idealism had faded. He stayed in his room for two weeks, not even coming downstairs for meals. His father had been aware of the drugs, but he'd only watched and waited, careful not to intrude upon the painful readjustment.

During his third week home, Carey received a visit from the widow of his best buddy in the corps, a man who'd died in his arms. Dhani MacIntosh had taken the bus from Chicago-a day and a half trip with transfers and layovers-and had walked the last three miles from the highway. She brought the pictures Mac had sent back to her, all the ones in which he and Carey had been standing arm-in-arm or clowning around with the usual rude gestures and uplifted beer bottles. And she wanted to talk about Mac, wanted to know everything that the brief letters hadn't been able to say, wanted to be with someone Mac had loved like a brother.

It was the first time Carey had cried since he'd come back. They both cried, held each other and cried.

“The first time I saw Mac, he was nineteen,” Carey began. “He had just flunked out of college and decided the marines might pay the bills for you and Mac Junior. He walked into our temporary camp after carrying a basketball through five miles of jungle. Best damn sight I'd seen in four long months of hell. He called me ‘Shorty'… it was the first time in years I'd looked up at anyone… and asked me if I played basketball. We set up a makeshift hoop and played horse or twenty-one or one-on-one. Sometimes when we went back to the main camp for a few days, we'd put together a real game. Mac and I, Luger and Ant, along with a pickup guard or sometimes without one. We whipped everyone's ass.”

“He said you were the first cool honkey he'd ever met,” Dhani said with a smile.

“I had fewer hang-ups than a lot of folks out there, and Mac and I liked to party. No women,” Carey quickly interposed. “There weren't any out where we spent most of our time. Mac and I and some of the crew would just party up and talk about what we were going to do when we got out. He wanted to start up a community center in your old neighborhood, he said, and help a few kids out of the ghetto. Mac always felt if he'd paid more attention in school, he wouldn't have flunked out. The basketball scholarship got him to college but couldn't keep him there.”

“He never learned how to read real well,” Dhani said softly.

“I know. He knew. But he wanted to make it better for some other kids. It's the only fast track out of the ghetto, he'd say, sports and school.”

“I'm in a job training program now. I think I might be able to start college next year.”

Carey's eyes filled with tears, and he brushed a quick hand over the wetness. “Do you know how happy Mac would be to know that? Hey, Mac, you hear that?” he said, looking up. “You hear how smart a wife you've got?” He smiled a rueful smile at Dhani. “I talk to him all the time. Christ, people'll call me nuts, I suppose, but I do.”

“Me, too. He was the kind you just know would always listen.”

Carey looked out at the late fall landscape and swore under his breath. Turning back abruptly, he said, “You know what pisses me off something fierce? There's plenty of assholes living… and Mac's dead. It's not fair!”

“Did he suffer?” Dhani asked after they'd talked about the futility and the injustice, after they'd discussed the good memories and the good times. She had avoided the question until the last because she wanted to know, but was afraid of the answer.

“No,” Carey replied. Sitting on the porch railing in the late afternoon sun, he looked down at the even rows of planking below his feet before he looked back at her. “No, he didn't suffer,” he lied.

Dhani exhaled a great breath of relief. “I was afraid… he'd… the end was… awful.”

“It was fast,” Carey said. “Really. How's Mac Junior?” he asked. And while Dhani talked about her son, Carey tried to press back the terrible memories of Mac's death.