Wife On Demand Read online

  It was hot. The sun had been burning down from a cloudless sky all day. He flung open a window, but no wind stirred the heat in the room. They were sweating as they stripped off their clothes again and embraced again on the cotton sheets. The sweat made their bodies slide liquidly against each other, it soaked their hair and dripped into their eyes, they drank it from each other’s lips and skin.

  Darkness washed over her in waves, alternating with the streaming sunlight of the long, hot afternoon. Hope knew it was night only when he turned on the bedside lamp. It went on and on, the incredible, indescribable hunger of the flesh and the senses.

  When he fell away from her for the tenth—or the hundredth—time, and she lay in a pool of their mingled sweat, her hair drenched on her scalp, her body drained of everything, she came to a momentary clarity and whispered, “My God, what is it?”

  He replied, “I’m obsessed with you.” And even then, even then, when she was utterly weak, worn out with pleasure she had never dreamed possible, these words had the power to stir her, and her womb clenched with anticipation.

  Groggily, wearily, she struggled up. A clock beside the bed read twelve minutes past one in the morning, but it did not register. She looked down at him. He lay flat, one arm bent over his stomach, his head back against a twisted pillow. He was bathed in sweat, his dark hair made black, his skin glistening in the soft lamp glow. He watched her from half-closed eyes.

  “You’re beautiful!” she breathed.

  He reached up and clasped her neck, pulling her down to kiss him, and she subsided against his chest and fell asleep.

  They awoke in the hot night and found each other in the darkness, and their mutual hunger was as deep as ever. In the morning the heat had not lifted, and again, sweating and groaning, they pushed and pulled at each other’s body, seeking the solace of physical completion.

  It was after noon before Hope staggered into the office. Her body felt bruised, weary, sore, and she had never been so physically exhausted. Every muscle was slack with overuse. Everything ached. And yet through her blood happiness sang a song that constantly pulled the corners of her lips into a smile.

  Lena, her father’s secretary, looked at her with one eyebrow raised, but there was no time for joking today. “Thank God you came in. I haven’t had time to get to the mail yet, with all the problems at Concord House East. I didn’t know how I was going to cope.”

  In any case, the mail was Hope’s job. She picked up the pile from reception. “It’s Jude on the line for you, Hope,” said the unsuspecting receptionist. “He’s down at the site.”

  She went into her father’s office and closed the door before picking up the phone. “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he returned, his voice stirring her so that her head drooped and fell against the high back of her chair. “How are you?” They had parted only an hour ago.

  “Exhausted.”

  “Yeah.” he agreed. “I’ll see you tonight. If I’m late, wait for me.” It was half plea, half command.

  “Yes,” she said, and put the phone down.

  She worked, she never understood how, with thoughts and images of the night whirling through her head. Wherever she looked she saw Jude’s eyes, or his urgent body; if she closed her eyes she felt desire and the memory of sated desire ribboning through her blood and bone.

  She went home at seven, bathed and changed, packed a suitcase. She left a note for her father, saying she wouldn’t be home for a few days, threw her bag into the car and drove to Jude’s and let herself in with the keys he had given her.

  The heat of the day was stifling, more uncomfortable indoors. Yesterday his apartment had been hot because he had not left the air conditioning on, but today the air conditioning did not have the power to cool the burning air by more than a few degrees.

  She took another cooling shower in his bathroom and pulled a spaghetti-strap white cotton sundress over her stilldamp, naked body, then sat down to phone Jude. His mobile phone did not answer. She knew he would be either at the Rose Library site or on his way home, and there might be a hundred different reasons why he didn’t answer his phone. But still she wanted to go to him, and only the thought that she might pass him en route stopped her. She left her hand on the phone, feeling the pulse of potential connection with him.

  Under her hand it rang. “You’re there,” he said. “Did you call a few minutes ago?”

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “I was up on top. I dropped my phone trying to answer it, and nearly followed it down.”

  She had a sudden vision of the little phone spiralling down and smashing itself to shards on concrete, and her stomach twisted. If he had fallen, too, would she have known it? Or would she have sat there, her hand on the phone, waiting for him...

  She said, because nothing else could be expressed, “Are you coming home?”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  She turned on the radio and played music to pass the time. They were playing love songs from her teenage years, and she closed her eyes and remembered the years following the accident, when she had listened to these same songs with such desperate yearning—fearing, knowing, that it could never happen for her, and yet praying that someday it would.

  We didn’t wait to fall in love

  We loved and then we met

  No promises

  No thought of time

  And no room for regret...

  How well she remembered the haunting ballad from those days after the accident. It had hit the charts when she was recovering, when she had nothing to do but lie in bed and mourn her mother, grieve for her lost future.

  So wake me up to say goodbye

  ’Cause now it’s over.

  It had meant her life then. Her mother had not woken her up to say goodbye, and so much was over. Her sports, her dancing, her carefree life...and that future that had just been beginning, of boys and dates and watching her girl’s body change into a woman’s. Instead it had changed into something that would forever limit her. “Hope, I’m afraid the pain will never go away entirely,” the doctor had said.

  From then on, the slow understanding, revealed over the years, of just how much would be denied to her. Then this song, played over and over in those lonely moments that could never be expressed to anyone, had become a mantra of what she would never experience.

  There seems to be so much to give

  All through the night...

  She would never have that, she had thought then. Even if passion visited her, it would never be wild, untroubled, spontaneous. Everything she did was painful. Any man who wanted her would have to be so patient, so controlled. But she was pretty sure it would never happen. Hope had written herself out of the romance sweepstakes early; her behaviour and attitude had been a constant signal to men that she knew she was unattractive, and was anyway unavailable.

  Hearing the song for the first time in years, remembering that pain now against a background so bright it blinded her, she smiled and wept at the same time. Tears of joy. She thought, I’ll find someone who has the same problem I did, someone who can’t afford the treatment, and send them to Raoul Spitzen for the miracle.

  Her passion for Jude, and his for her, was a miracle. The power of it was with her every second, even when she was thinking of something else. She had only to tune in to the signal, and there it was, blinding, deafening her.

  Another song from her past—moody, sexy. The singer’s voice touching her skin and reminding her of Jude’s touch, the erotic lower notes making her think of Jude’s cries and her own, when the pleasure was too much for them.

  Her stomach was churning with anticipation when she heard the key in the lock at last, but she stayed where she was, the music playing, and waited for him.

  The door closed, his keys and briefcase clanked on the hall table, and then his footsteps sounded down the hall, and Jude stood in the doorway looking at her.

  He was in work clothes again, the dirt clinging to his shirt and pants
and his sweating skin as if he were a bricklayer, emphasising the swell and hollow of hard muscle. Her stomach clenched, her body already melting into readiness for him. Behind her, a woman sang of love.

  Her head tilted against the chair back, and she gazed at him from half-shut eyes, up and down his body, her lips parting to breathe. Jude came towards her wordlessly, bent, slipped an arm around her waist and drew her helplessly to her feet and against his body, locked her chin in his other hand and pillaged her already bruised mouth with a deep, insistent kiss. She felt grit against her skin, and her hand stroked his sweat-damp hair and pulled him closer.

  Now she smelled the man smell of him, sensuous, heady, heightened by his day’s hard labour, and shivered in delight. “You’re all I dreamed of... ” sang the woman.

  His hands cupped her and dragged her lower body against his, pulling the skirt of her dress up in his urgency, reaching for the heat of her. She was wearing no underwear, and when his touch discovered it, he grunted and his body leapt painfully against her.

  “What are you doing to me?” he whispered hoarsely, and then she realized he was dragging at his belt, at his zipper, and then he had lifted her and driven home so suddenly that she cried aloud.

  “When I dreamed of love. ”

  The weeks that followed were the most intense, and intensely lived, time of her life. Hope became a completely physical being; nothing had validity to her except as it affected the senses. She and Jude did not speak, except of their lovemaking, but it felt like full communication. She did not miss those other chats that a woman might have with her lover. The physical said it all. When he looked at her and breathed an expletive, when he involuntarily put out a hand and dragged her against him, it was for her, for him, a whole volume of expression.

  When they were not making love, she painted him. In between, she went to the office, and did her work there in another plane, her brain working independently of her real self, which was only physical.

  There was a heat wave in the city. It contributed to the overwhelming physicality of their existence. Air conditioning use had to be rationed, and in any case, no ordinary air conditioner could cope effectively with the constant soaring temperatures. The city drooped, while Hope. like a hothouse plant, blossomed. Her skin glowed, her eyes glowed, there was a new energy in her walk even when they had spent the night in lovemaking and slept no more than an hour or two. Especially when they had spent the night in lovemaking and slept no more than an hour or two.

  The painting was of a stone lion brought to life by sexual craving. She had never painted anything so blatantly erotic in her life. She thought vaguely of those paintings she used to do, of human struggle against the elements—all that powerful tension was transmuted into the sexual in the painting of Jude, and she realized belatedly that it always had been sexual. She had disguised her own sexual tension in those paintings—as sexual tension must when there is no direct outlet, it had found another. Now it had an outlet, and it leapt straight out into the world, like the lion of Jude.

  The exact geometric centre of the canvas was Jude’s sex. She had done that entirely unconsciously, that first day, and only realized it later. That was the truth she had been seeking in the painting, that answered the question of her hostility towards him. If she had gone on in unconsciousness, she would have discovered the truth when the painting was finished: the source of her dislike of Jude had been powerful unexpressed desire. As it was, she painted him in that split second before he became hard, so that the painting quivered with becoming. She called it Transfiguration. But she showed it to no one.

  When he was not there, when she was in the apartment waiting for him, she painted him from memory. She painted him standing, or lying in tangled sheets, she painted his face, his hands...sometimes, when he was too long, an empty chair by the sitting room window, or an empty bed.

  When he came in, whatever time it was, they made love before anything else, wherever she happened to be, whatever their intentions to the contrary. He would come into the room where she was, and kiss her with a passion that needed no coaxing in either of them, a passion that was instantly at a peak, and then he would say, “Let me shower nrst.” or she would say, “You must be starving, let’s eat first,” but they never did. The floor, the sofa, the table, the bed, even the nearest wall—whatever was handy became their bed.

  Jude worked long, hard hours. The Rose Library was up, the scaffolding gone. They were doing the interior now—flooring, plastering. In the burning hot sun of that remarkable summer the automatic sunscreen that the glass manufacturers had developed specially for this project made the glass rose glow a deep pink on the outside. People marvelled at the singular beauty of this small, perfect building, and began to wonder why other buildings could not, like this one, give solace to the human spirit, rather than assault it.

  The camps in the city were now wildly unequal in numbers—the architects who found Jude Daniels a threat, and a few journalists who thrived on their unpopular opinions, were the only ones now in the anti camp. The city of people loved the building, and the way it conquered the less approachable giants surrounding it by its endless reflection in their mirrored walls—making them invisible. Jude was suddenly everybody’s favourite architect. Enquiries came into the office every day, far more than Thompson Daniels could ever hope to undertake.

  Then, one burning hot Sunday afternoon, a bank of dark storm clouds arose from nowhere over the city, and within half an hour the temperature had dropped and everyone knew the heat wave was over.

  More than the heat wave. As they lay in bed, listening to the sudden unseasonable, freak burst of hail against the windows and revelling in the first cool air for weeks, Hope and Jude were startled by the phone.

  Jude picked it up, and Hope, who was lazily stroking his chest, watched all movement and all blood drain from his face until he was a wax mask. His eyes black, his voice hoarse, he croaked a question, and swung up to a sitting position on the edge of the bed, his head bent over.

  Hope’s heart filled with nameless fear, unable to imagine anything that would cause such a response in Jude. She sat back motionless on the sheet, staring in silent, still dread at his back while Jude asked two more questions and then put the phone down.

  He did not move. He sat motionless, staring at nothing. “Jude?” she whispered, terrified.

  He turned and looked at her, his face drawn and blank.

  “The glass in the Rose Library has exploded,” he said hoarsely. “A passerby has been injured. The night watchman is dead.”

  Chapter 5

  It was a scene from the empty, cold version of hell. A field of massive hunks of curved, broken glass interspersed with knee-deep mounds of shards stretched endlessly to the horizon, and above it, regular rows of trees whose curving, naked steel branches glittered with rain under the grey of lowering cloud.

  She stood aghast, and it was only when she saw a distant flickering image of herself that her brain sorted out the reflected images from the real.

  “Stay back,” Jude ordered tersely, automatically pulling on the hard hat that was always in the car. “There will still be glass coming down.”

  His caution did not extend to his own safety. He strode across the glass-strewn fore court towards the cedar stern of his dead rose without once looking up.

  The ambulances had already gone. A police car sat at the side of the road, but Jude had ignored the occupants. They leapt out of their car now and shouted after him, and Hope crossed over to them.

  “It’s Jude Daniels,” she said. “He’s the architect.” The wailing whup of sirens distracted them all, and around the comer came the first of a fleet of police cars and fire trucks, and suddenly the street was full of men and women with walkie-talkies self-importantly trying to decide what to do.

  Jude, meanwhile, disappeared inside the building.

  Another civilian car screeched to a stop beside a police car, and Hope saw her father, white and shaken, leap from it, the engine st
ill running. He pushed past the cluster of uniforms and ran towards the building, stopping in horror at the border where broken glass began. By that time Hope was at his side.

  “Father!” she cried.

  “My God!” he breathed. “No!”

  She was frightened suddenly. He was so white, and he was trembling. He looked twenty years older. “Dad!” she cried, because he had not seen her, he had seen nothing but the wreckage. “Dad!”

  He turned blind eyes towards her. “Jude,” he said. “Where’s Jude?”

  “He’s gone inside to examine the damage,” she said stupidly, trying desperately to make her voice sound normal, because her father’s face, his being, terrified her. Not even at her bedside, telling her her mother was dead, had he looked like this.

  “That’s right, he’ll look after it,” he muttered, and then, without warning, Hal Thompson clutched his chest, grunted like a shot animal, and fell to the ground at her feet.

  Jude joined her at her father’s bedside in the hospital in the early hours of the morning. He was exhausted, filthy, and had been cut on face and arms; his blood had been negligently wiped and dried on his shirt.

  “How is he?” he asked. She had never seen Jude so drained, so unlike himself.

  “He hasn’t regained consciousness yet.”

  He wiped a hand over his face and muttered a curse.

  The sound of her father’s oxygen hissed rhythmically in the silence as they sat together, not speaking. After a while she said, “Jude, shouldn’t you go home and get some sleep while you can?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Can you?” She silently shook her head. They sat and watched through the night, but there was no change. Jude left at seven to go home and shower and change, but Hope stayed on, tired but with nerves too stretched to think of sleep.