Although her eyes were not quite shut, her slumber was impenetrable. Stretched across the big bed, golden-skinned Elise lay sleeping in white panties and a shredded aqua T-shirt. In the blackness of night, the general’s mistress slept heavily, without dreams. She never dreamed.
Outside, on the balcony, Benharash sat motionless in a massive wicker chair. A cigarette pushed into his fleshy, wounded lips, he stared out into the foggy night. Below, some twenty yards from the house, a tightly-packed group of soldiers stood around an open fire. The soldiers blew on their cold hands, pulled their greatcoats tightly around them. Neither cold nor heat troubled their hairy general, and on nights like this, he made a show of wearing only a T-shirt and a thin sarong. Benharash’s stamina awed the army and its enemies. Those who followed him were emboldened by his courage and comforted by his love; those who opposed him despaired in the face of his truculence.
Every day, throughout the bloody campaign, Benharash had marched and swaggered at the head of his troops. Under the worst privations, he was indomitable, scorning danger and pain, and half-convincing his men to do the same. Often he carried a wounded soldier on his back; the injured man’s blood soaked into his uniform, and he wore those gory stains with ferocious honor. Men had drawn their last breaths with their heads against the nape of their general’s neck. Once, when a particularly young and valiant soldier died on his back, Benharash ceremoniously stopped the march and lined up the army so that all would witness their general bury the dead hero with his own hard hands. Now his marines, held out of battle, had utter conviction in the righteousness of their stalwart general’s refusal to engage San Francisco.
Below, from their campfire, on that frosty night, his guards looked up at his patio, and they saw him half-naked and pensive.
Benharash trickled into his goblet the last drops from a bottle of wine. He watched the dark-red liquid spin. Inactivity, month after empty month, had smothered his heart. Purposeless moments bled his spirit. Each day was a redundant episode of oblivion. To counter spiritual atrophy, he drilled his troops, hunted bandits on the peninsula, and subjected his body to endless exercise. Every day, he ran five hilly miles, then swam a mile in the frigid Bay. But overdrilling went against Benharash’s gain and bored his veteran troops; his raids to the south had cleaned the peninsula of renegades; and exercises, though they maintained his strength, did nothing to keep his instincts keen.
He slept only four or five hours each night. Elise tried, but she could not keep his hours; consequently, his nights were long, lonely, and filled with brooding. The frivolous degeneracy of the ALA camp’s nightlife held no interest for him. Without Elise or Puglese to read to him, the illiterate intellectual had no access to his beloved books. He brooded about Napoleon, finishing the last years of his brilliant life as a pathetic card cheat on St. Helena. Drinking increased his depression, but he did it anyway. Simply put, the great man was inadequate to the routine of daily life when separated from his natural and electrifying milieu.
Puglese had given Benharash a telescope and tutored him in basic astronomy. The attendant hoped to provide the general a hobby that would seem useful to the military man and help him to wile away the gloomy nights. The stargazing diverted Benharash, and with Puglese’s help, he kept a detailed log of his sightings. Unfortunately, the frequent fogs of San Francisco often thwarted even this minimal pleasure, thus creating yet a new frustration that further aggravated his morose musings.
He stood, stretched, and with a respectful salute to the guards below, the general turned back through the French doors that led into his bedroom. He vaguely hoped to sleep. Inside the dark bedroom, he bumped into a table. The slight clamor roused Elise; invisible in the dark, she rolled onto her side, back towards him. The general, his breath whistling through his maimed nose, slouched toward his gargantuan bed. Now awake, Elise listened carefully, yet pretended to sleep. The dry-docked general looked down on his golden-skinned mistress; he listened to the steadiness of her breath, just as she listened the repulsive wheeze of his own. Finally, he lay down beside her and closed his eyes tightly.
After a few moments, the general slid his hand down her smooth, young back, then across her cool-skinned buttocks. She lay motionless. His huge hand slid under her leg. When her breathing changed, he stopped abruptly, but kept his hand within her. They lay that way for two or three minutes, and then he began gently caressing her vulva. Still, Elise made no movement. She bit her lip to keep silent, for she knew how to comfort her troubled lover. Elise labeled this kind of lovemaking “playing dead girl.” Eventually, he spread her labia and pushed his huge penis inside her.
Afterwards, they lay motionless. Eventually, he wiped his semen off her vagina and legs with a soft towel. Finally, Elise rolled over and kissed him. He hugged her desperately, and she whispered, “You’re so sweet, so sweet.”
#
A diamond bracelet gleamed on a black felt cloth. Elegant white hands pinched up the shimmering, bluish jewels; long, narrow fingers with blood-red nails lovingly laid bracelet across a nacreous wrist. Helen Wentworth adored jewelry and spent her private moments caressing her gems. Her father had been a prominent jeweler (hence her position in San Francisco’s small upper class). He died shortly after Helen’s immensely beneficial marriage to Thurston Wentworth; the gemologist passed on serenely, as though his life’s work was completed. As much as she loved diamonds, Helen disdained commerce, and she closed the family business within two months of her father’s death. Her aged mother protested; the widow wanted to carry on the enterprise that had been her husband’s life’s work. But Helen’s will was strong too, and she was utterly without sentimentality. She indifferently sold off her parents’ treasured inventory below market value--except for the diamonds, which she kept for herself. Emeralds, sapphires, pearls, rubies, and gold meant nothing to Helen. She sold those gems to get more money to spend on her preferred rocks. Her love and craving for diamonds grew stronger as time went on. She spent time each night at her vanity table, poring through her great treasure and posing before her mirror. Her collection was her love, what she called “my stuff.”
If Helen’s jewels were “her stuff,” the rest of the contents of her massive bedroom was “her junk.” In each corner, unruly piles of clothes were stacked five feet high. Elegant dresses, worn once, lay in colorful heaps, mixed in with pants, shirts, and shoes. Helen swore that she could find any particular garment within ninety seconds, but this rapid retrieval had never been tested--for she rarely wore a dress twice, and, from midstack to bottom, the rich clothes were covered in thick gray dust. Other clutter, too, filled her mauve room: makeup covered tabletops and dressers; stacks of books, brimming with dried flowers that she had collected from across the trading routes of California’s mountains, valleys, and coastlines, leaned shapelessly against the walls; a dozen or so unframed paintings rested against the door of a dusty armoire, which was closed forevermore. At least two other rooms of the Wentworth mansion were filled to the brim with Helen’s Junk: collections of cherrywood furniture, vintage kitchenware, and oriental rugs. Booty abounded in the depopulated state, and collectors like Helen gorged themselves on their material passions.
Thurston Wentworth stood on the green carpet in the high-ceilinged hall, outside his wife's great oak door. He rarely went into the room, as its mind-boggling disorder exhausted his eye and made his heart sore. Occasionally he referred to Helen’s cavern as la petite Shambles (pronouncing the noun in English).
Helen had always insisted on having her own room. Her stipulation was a matter of territoriality, not of sex evasion. Her body was his for the asking; but her room was her own. Conjugal relations took place across the hall in what was called “our room.” But Thurston slept alone there, and Helen retreated to her den after they had satisfied their nightly needs. She used the excuse that Thurston’s incessant nighttime tossing kept her awake. Thurston did not mind, for the solitude gave the high-strung man free rein to get up and pace periodically throughout the night. Accommodation bound them tightly.
Thurston’s hand jangled the lock. He bounced on his toes and breathed deeply to defuse his manic energy. On the battlefield, Thurston’s hummingbird metabolism was an asset: Along with his courage, strength, and dexterity, inexhaustible energy made him a formidable killing machine. However, in daily life, his hyperactivity made him a nuisance to his wife.
Helen flipped a priceless bracelet aside. "Yes?" she said hesitatingly.
"It’s me. May I come in?" Thurston called through the thick door.
Helen looked at herself in the mirror. Her curly, reddish hair hung down around her white shoulders. She touched a tress and smiled. Only her husband saw her with her hair down. In public, her luxurious hair was always piled high and queenlike, in the fashion of the day. She dropped her smile and studied her beauty. It was filled with mysterious presence, and even when she was alone, her face was devoid of candor. Pleased by her power and beauty, Helen used both for what she intuited to be the good of San Francisco.
"Helen? I need the door unlocked.”
Thurston’s eternal impatience! She worked hard to cure him. She waited. He shook the door again. "No," she said finally. "Just push it a bit more than feels right. It will open."
With a thump of his shoulder, Thurston Wentworth pushed wide the heavy door. Once inside, he walked quickly across lavender Persian rug that covered the center of the packrat’s room. She did not look at him, but remained fixed on her own image in the mirror. He placed his hands on Helen's shoulders. He touched her delicate clavicle with his fat, pink, killer's fingers. She glanced at him in the mirror but looked away before he caught her eye. A large blue vein thumped on the side of his forehead, the unfailing indicator that some singular anxiety had piled atop her Wentworth’s unmercifully manic norm. By gauging the force of the blood pounding through Thurston’s always-fuming brain, Helen calibrated how her soldier must be handled.
"What’s wrong?" she whispered, her eyes softening as if on cue.
"I wish we didn’t know about this." The words were stiff in his jaw.
Helen thought for a moment, and then a mischievous smile broke across her face. "Todd and that woman?"
"You said yourself, it’s probably harmless,” he sighed. “I say we leave them alone."
Helen turned, reached up, and took her husband by his wide, thick-boned, bluish chin; she held it with interest and pride, much as she had held the diamonds. She whispered, "You are keeping an eye on them, aren’t you?"
“Yes. I said I would, and I have. My men are posted outside the councilman’s house, and the crippled chap who guards her knows to come to me if anything looks fishy. It’s all as you wanted.”
“Are you sure about the guard?” she asked archly. “I imagine that after living with her for all these months, a man’s allegiance might be confused.” She paused, then mumbled, “She’s such a compelling little tramp.”
Thurston waved off the thought that Rollins could succumb to disloyalty. “He’s given one arm for his city and he’d give another if asked. The man is incorruptible.”
Helen rolled her eyes, but she dropped the subject. She began brushing her hair. Thurston walked around the room, occasionally grunting aloud some of the worrisome words of his interior monologue. After several moments, Helen offered him a drink; he waved it off irritably. Thurston never drank alcohol because it made him lose all control, and violence invariably followed intoxication.
After about fifteen minutes, what she thought to be her preternatural patience came to a natural end. Helen’s champagne eye beamed brightly. She gave him a tight smile. "Thurston, Thurston, Thurston. If there’s any chance that Miss Kout is in cahoots with her father, or that he should try to contact her by using another spy . . . we can’t look the other way just so your brother can get his dick wet.”
Thurston Wentworth shook his head at his beautiful wife’s vulgarity. He had never understood this side of her. So much about the Helen of this unkempt room escaped his understanding. She was so different here. "Todd needs a wife. I have you and you me. That’s the natural way of things. Thaddeus and May.”
She shrugged dismissively. “Fine. Let him get married. Just not to Kout’s daughter.”
“If it’s her he wants, who cares? He gets to choose, not us!”
“Not this time, buckaroo.”
Thurston walked away. He circled the room twice, grimacing as her disorder filled his eye. “We can give him his few moments. There’s time for that.”
Helen turned back to her vanity table and opened a black-lacquered Chinese box. She looked inside, smiled, and grabbed a fistful of diamond trinkets. She shook her head, smiling ever more broadly. Then Helen’s face became blank and she put a double string of blue rocks to her long neck; she cocked her head appraisingly. She looked at Thurston and displayed the string, inviting comment. But he turned away and resumed pacing. Every few seconds he looked back at Helen, but she had returned to her mirror as though he had left the room. Thurston sat down in an overstuffed chair, flung his leg over the arm. For many moments, they sat in silence. Their private moments were often silent. Their private moments never had the vivacity that typified their public appearances. They were energized by the presence of others. Alone, they grew ponderous and cool. The public buoyancy was not an act; nor was the private silence a matter of distance. They were in both cases, as in all things, a partnership. But for some reason unknown to both, when they were alone they grew serious and filled with their own identities. Without the frame of society, their love lost its boundaries and became amorphous, and their separate identities became profound.
"I’ll talk to Thaddeus,” said Thurston. He rose and stomped toward the door.
"No need," Helen said breathlessly. Then in a calmer tone she said, "I’ve explained everything to Thaddeus." She paused and turned toward Thurston. His eyes accused her. She shook her finger at him. "I’ve saved you from having to betray Todd. I acted without consulting you, so now there’s no need for you to feel guilty. So for God’s sake, don’t pout!"
Thurston Wentworth looked away, thinking not of his wife or brother, but of his family. His defense of Todd and the traitor's daughter was more than just brotherly empathy: It was a matter of family pride. Thurston loathed the thought that a Wentworth could be compelled to forfeit his mistress. He considered marching downstairs and confronting Thaddeus with a demand that Todd be left to his own choices. His instinct was to force the moment to a crisis; Thurston used his strength to suppress his impetuosity. He was wise enough to see that his wife was more clever than he; he knew that before Helen decided on a plan of action, she put her thoughts through a brutal dialectic. He had no capacity for reasoned reflection. Therefore, Thurston followed Helen’s guidance, even when, as now, he hated her conclusion.
Seeing submission in her husband’s face, Helen said reassuringly, "Thaddeus will do what needs to be done. Don’t trouble over this anymore."
She turned back to her mirror, waving good-bye over her shoulder. Thurston, perplexed but resigned, left the room.
Looking through and fondling Her Stuff, Helen sighed, “You should thank me.” She felt that she had taken the steps that were in the best interest of all. Yet she felt a slight tremor in her heart, the sign of wavering conviction. She had set into motion events that could end with her brother-in-law’s alienation from her. Worse, the forced separation of Todd from his inamorata could drive a wedge between Todd and his brothers. Helen knew that anything that pitted Wentworth against Wentworth boded calamity for all her goals.