Page 46 of Passion's Wicked Torment

“Sell the ship, or buy me out,” she said coldly to Sean.

“All right,” he agreed, still frowning. “If it’s Paris we're off to, then it’s Paris we’re off to.”

She tried to make her words soft, to lessen the pain. “I didn’t say ‘we.’ ”

McShane was shocked, and he showed it. Then he shook his head. “You’re not yourself. I’m not letting you go gallivanting off alone in a foreign land in your condition.” He did not mention how hurt he was that she would even want to go away without him, He appealed to her on a purely practical, medical basis.

Finally, after listening to his argument, she acquiesced. “You can come. But I’ll tell you honestly, Sean, you’ll wish you hadn’t. You won’t be able to put up with me for very long. I’m not the same girl I was three days ago.”

“Ah, Kristy,” he said, smiling, “it’s just your shock, that’s all. When you’ve had a chance to recover, you’ll be the same old Kristy you’ve always been. And we’ll be closer than ever, I promise you.”

She didn’t have the heart to tell him what she thought would be the more likely outcome. She leaned back against the fluffy pillow and closed her eyes, pretending she was tired. The doctor gently told McShane to leave the room, and, after kissing Kristin on the forehead, he did so. Shortly thereafter, the doctor left too, leaving her alone.

Kristin opened her eyes. She had a crazy urge, and she responded to it. She got out of bed and threw off her cotton hospital nightgown. Naked, she went to the dresser and opened the drawer, searching through the contents of what had previously been in her purse. She found the lip gloss, which she only rarely used. She applied a very thick paste to her lips, something she had never done before. Then she stood before the dresser mirror and looked at her naked body and her gaudy painted lips. She rasied her chin high and threw her shoulders back, not proudly, but brazenly.

There, she thought. There! She knew in the deep recesses of her mind that she was embarking on a new phase of her life unlike anything that had gone before. Vaguely, intuitively, she understood that she was about to enter a new, self-destructive phase of her life, a phase that might even lead to her death.

Her hands moved over her breasts, down her flanks and over her rounded hips. I welcome it! she screamed in her mind to the mirror. So help me, God. I welcome it!

CHAPTER 26

Kristin laughed gaily and waved her champagne glass high in the air. There was an edge of hysteria to her laugh, but no one detected it.

“Kristin, come down from there,” pleaded the tall, slender Frenchman, André Clerc, half-jokingly. “You can’t go up there, chérie."

“Why can’t I?” Kristin replied playfully. She was on the middle rungs of the metal structural ladder, only a few feet off the ground, looking up at the stairway that began a few feet higher up. She had never even seen the Eiffel Tower before, except in pictures, and now she was clinging to the ladder at the base of one of its pillars, preparing to climb up to the stairway.

“Come, come, Kristy,” urged the young American writer who was standing beside André, looking up at her. “You know the tower’s been closed at night ever since the war. That’s why the bottom of the stairway extension was removed. You wouldn’t even have gotten this far if not for André’s being such a fool and picking open the lock on the gate surrounding the place.” He glanced at his French friend with mild reproof.

André retorted with mock indignation, stroking his pencil-thin mustache. “How dare you slight my skill, you ignorant cochon Américain! It is a skill handed down from father to son for generations in my family! I stand before you as one of the foremost lock pickers in France. I—”

“Oh, hush up a moment, won’t you? Can’t you see she’s serious?” The American writer, H. Craig Brady, turned back to Kristin and said, “Now, see here, Kristin, you can’t go clambering all over French monuments like that.”

“Why not?” she asked, smiling teasingly.

“Well, it’s dangerous, for one thing. And for another . . . how shall I put this tactfully? Darling, you’re as drunk as a skunk. Soused to the gills, I might say.”

Kristin laughed and held up her çhampagne glass in toast to his perceptive observation. Then she drank the last of the bubbly sweet liquid and tossed the glass away. André and H. Craig Brady leaped aside as the glass flew down and shattered in front of them.

“Lyons crystal!” exclaimed the Frenchman in halfdrunk horror. “She shattered my Lyons crystal champagne glass! Now I’m really mad,” he said. “Now I’m going to teach you a lesson.” He charged forward to the metal ladder and tried to grab Kristin’s legs. She quickly scurried farther up the ladder out of his reach. Then she kept climbing until she reached the first stairway landing, from which she climbed onto the metal circular steps.

“Now you’ve done it,” Brady chastised his friend. “Look at that. You’ve made her climb up higher. I think she really means to climb to the top.”

Kristin looked down at them. They were young, handsome men, and at the moment they were looking up at her, wondering what she was going to do. The night was pleasant and balmy, and a breeze continually swirled her chiffon skirt up above her knees. She had her white-gloved hand down, holding the skirt to a modest level. The streets and boulevards of Paris stretched out before her, but she could not see enough of them. She was still too low. She bent slightly back to look up at the top of the Eiffel Tower, leaning a bit dizzily over the edge of the stairway landing to get a good view.

“Kristin, damn it now. Be careful!” shouted Brady from below.

“Chérie, if you fall, I will never forgive myself! And more important, the authorities, they will never forgive me! It was I who brought you here from the party. It was I who picked the lock. So please, chérie! Please, come down!”

Kristin laughed at him, smiling gaily, desperately. “I want to see all of Paris, André. From the top!” She started climbing the cold, circular metal stairs. She was barefoot, as she’d kicked off her shoes before climbing the ladder to this landing.

“Chérie, I beg of you!”

“And when I reach the top,” she shouted down to them, playfully, “you know what I’m going to do? Something very romantic, André. I’m going to jump.”

The two men looked at each other, first in wonderment, then in horror. “She is mad, you know, André. I do believe the girl is capable of anything.” They ran for the ladder and clambered up it to the first stair landing, from which they could take the circular stairway the rest of the way.

The two men were panting for breath as they hurried after her. She was not really trying to get away, though, and about a quarter of the way up they caught her. She sat down on the landing, out of breath. They sat down too.

"Chérie,” scolded André, “you are too much for a poor, simple Frenchman such as I.” Andre was not really a poor, simple Frenchman. His family owned the Pattiepeden department store chain in Paris and Lyons, and since the war had ended, he had become a millionaire several times over. Brady was no pauper either. As the most successful expatriate American novelist, of what was being referred to as the “lost generation,” he was quite well-to-do. Together, André and Brady were staunch pillars of the dissolute, disrespectful class of the young, wild and rich whom Kristin had fallen in with since coming to Paris.

“I say, old sport,” said the American to his friend, “so long as we’re here already, we might as well make a party of it, wot?”

“Party!” exclaimed Kristin, laughingly. “Party!”

André raised his eyebrows in interest, but then shrugged at the difficulties this presented. “We could import the rest of the lads and ladies we left behind at my chateau. But how do we let them know we’re here? Kristin ran out so suddenly, and we after her, we didn’t take time to let anyone know where we were going.” “Well, I for one have come prepared.” Brady reached into his back pocket and produced a hip flask. Not just any hip flask, but a gleaming, silver-plated one. He uncapped it and offered

it gallantly to Kristin, bowing.

Without even asking what was in it, she took a swallow, found that she could stomach it and took several more. It tasted like gin, but she could not be sure. She had taken up drinking shortly after she had come to France two months ago, and by now she had reached the point where she could handle the hard liquor without getting sick. But she still could not tell one type of drink from another. It was her drinking that had been the last straw in finally convincing Sean to leave her over a month ago. But she did not want to think of him now. He had failed her in a major way, as she knew he would, though through no fault of his own.

André took several swallows when the flask was passed to him, then gave it back to Brady. The Frenchman turned his attention to Kristin, taking her hand in his. “Chérie, I am wild about you. You drive me crazy! You’re like no American girl I know—like no girl I know of any nationality!”

“She’s an institution unto herself,” suggested Brady in an amiable way, helping his friend with his line.

“Chérie, you are an institution unto yourself,” declared André. “And I want to marry you.”

“I accept,” said Kristin.

“Hear, hear!” applauded Brady. “My heartiest congratulations to you both.” He raised his flask in honor of the occasion and took another swig.

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