spies and assets

"Shh."

"Nobody's going to hear a thing," she whispered urgently.

"But downstairs!"

"Do you want to or don't you?"

"I--"

"Because if you don't, then get the fuck off of me."

Her coarseness took him aback. He pushed up onto his forearms, held himself there above her and regarded her with a sort of desperate curiosity. He still wore the black tie, and it chose that moment to slip free of its clasp and spill into Eleanor's face.

"Shit, Gregory," she said. Her arms were pinned in the cage created by his body, and he was slow to shift his weight to one side so that he could brush back the tie. She jerked her head to the side, her impatience with him sudden and caustic.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Eleanor, what is going on? Just a minute ago--"

"Whatever," she interrupted, and elbowed him aside.

"Ellie--"

She leveled him with her eyes. "Don't fucking call me that."

"I--"

"Just get out." She bit the words off clean and hard. The thing of it was, she didn't even know what had changed. In the hallway the two of them had met furtively, like spy and asset, both of them pulling madly at each other's hair and face and trying to watch the staircase and listen for footsteps over the churn of noise that floated up from below, where their mutual friends bustled about in various stages of intoxication, bumping into each other and laughing about everything. Their escape to the upstairs hallway had been unnoticed, and it had been empty there, and she turned the tables on him, pushing him to the wall and biting his lower lip, a fierce change from the subtle way he'd been tracing her palm with his finger, behind their backs in a corner of the crowded room, nobody the wiser.

She had lifted one of her tasteful black pumps into the air when he kissed her back. It was that movement that sealed the moment, she had realized. It had made her feel like an actress. This was her episode to regret later; this realization thrilled her. Jack had all of his travels and lovers, and she'd had virtually none. He had secrets that he was willing to tell her, she knew, if she asked the right questions. She wanted one of her own.

Gregory wasn't exactly what she had imagined, but she had thought he would do.

Downstairs she could hear Jack opining loudly about the primaries. He would have a willing and interested audience here for as long as he could hold them, she knew, and Jack could capture ears like nobody else. He had enough wine in him to go for an hour or more. So she took the opportunity and threw open a door, hoping it wasn't a closet, and pushed Gregory blindly inside. It was a spare bedroom and the bed was close to the door. He was off-balance and hit it awkwardly and folded like cardboard cutout. Eleanor kicked off her movie star pump and then flicked the door shut with a catlike turn of her ankle. It closed more loudly than she'd anticipated.

"Shh."

"Nobody will hear."

 

 

He was a nervous lover and she tired of him quickly. Whatever illicit charge she'd felt when he brushed her skin in full view of Jack was now gone; that look she'd seen in his eyes, the one that suggested he would show her things she'd never seen, the one that said You aren't leaving here until I've had you, was apparently a well-conducted performance. It was gone now, and in its place was this man who bumbled about between her legs as if blind, now and again stopping to look up and ask what the matter was. Finally she tugged him up by his thinning hair and growled. From then on he was ruined for her.

"Get off," she said at last, her tone disdainful. The pleasant buzz of the wine receded behind another, more insufferable hum, and Eleanor rolled onto her side as Gregory obliged, pushing himself away from her. Her skirt remained gathered around her waist, her bare white ass freckled with goosebumps, one lonely black pump still cupping her left foot, the other somewhere on the floor.

"I, um," he began, but that was all he had. The door clicked quietly shut. She sighed heavily, took several breaths, then slowed her heart. In the fresh quiet she could hear the clatter of voices below, almost like the murmur of lovers through a hotel room wall, but somehow even lonelier.

Jack's eyes narrowed at the sight of her bare feet when she returned to the party, and he raised his eyebrows inquisitively when she met his gaze. "Fuck off," she mouthed at him from across the room. He only smiled. She repeated herself, testing the shapes her lips made, trying to imagine what he'd thought she had said. Fell off, perhaps.

Well, fuck him and everybody else for not understanding. Eleanor wound through a knot of rosy-cheeked, small-framed women and found the bar, which was being manned by everybody's host, Francesca. "Elllllllllleanor," Francesca said brightly. Eleanor gave a perfunctory smile and bypassed Francesca's attempts to help, leaning over the bar to find a tumbler and the open bag of ice in the small sinklet, then poured herself a heavy glass of Jameson. Francesca frowned. The guests were supposed to be guests, not serving themselves. "It's fine," Eleanor said. "It's one of those nights." She walked away before Francesca could say her name in slow motion again.

Eleanor unspooled herself in Francesca's husband's arm chair, beside a ceiling-high bookcase stuffed to bursting with a showoff's collection. She doubted that Graydon had ever actually read The Brothers Karamazov. Eleanor sighed again and sipped at the whiskey, felt it spin a web of warmth inside her, and watched Jack mingle. Funny, she thought. She'd never actually hated Jack before. It was a completely new feeling. She held it inside like smoke, let it lift her for a moment, and then Jack smiled at her from the far corner of the room, and for a moment she saw Jack the Knife. She exhaled sharply, as if she'd been socked, and with the release she let go of that sudden and strange hatred of him.

Somebody's child -- who brought children to a party like this? -- tore through the room, leaving no evidence of its coming and going except for the pain that flared in Eleanor's toes where the child had stomped her. She spilled the whiskey across the lap of her skirt. The pale fabric darkened and clung to her legs. She still held the glass sideways in her hand. Jack had looked at her again, and they held the gaze, Eleanor's glass still dripping onto her dress. He lifted his eyebrows again, this time meaning something entirely different, and she nodded gratefully, and he came to her, and righted her glass and set it aside, and raised her to her feet and walked her through the front door and to their car, where inside Eleanor shimmied out of the dress and rode the twenty miles home in the passenger seat in her bra and slimming panties. If Jack noticed the unclasped snaps of her garters, he did not say, and Eleanor volunteered nothing.