The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,478

and it’s all connected …

“It’s all possible,” she said, scanning him for reaction. A little flame danced in her cheeks, in her eyes.

“Very near to perfect,” he said.

“So why do you look like that? What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Michael, stop thinking about those visions. Stop thinking about invisible people in the sky giving our lives meaning. There are no ghosts in the attic! Think for yourself.”

“I am, Rowan. I am. Don’t get angry. It’s a stunning idea. It’s perfect. I don’t know why it makes me uneasy. Have a little patience with me, honey. Like you said, our dreams have to be in proportion to our resources. And so it’s a little over my head.”

“All you have to do is love me and listen to me, and let me think out loud.”

“I’m with you, Rowan. Always. I think it’s great.”

“You’re having trouble imagining it,” she said. “I understand. I’ve only begun myself. But goddamn it, the money’s there, Michael. There is something absolutely obscene about the amount of that money. For two generations, these corporation lawyers have tended this fortune, allowing it to feed upon itself and multiply like a monster.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said.

“Long ago, they lost sight of the fact that it was the property of one person. It belongs to itself in some horrible way, it’s greater than any human being should have or control.”

“A lot of people would agree with you,” he said.

But he couldn’t shake that memory of lying in the hospital bed in San Francisco and believing that his whole life had meaning, that everything he’d ever done and been was about to be redeemed.

“Yes, it would redeem everything,” he said. “Wouldn’t it?”

So why did he see the grave in his mind, with its twelve slots, and the doorway above, and the name Mayfair inscribed in big letters, and the flowers withering in the suffocating heat?

He forced himself out of this, and went for the best distraction he knew. Just looking at her, just looking and thinking about touching her, and resisting the urge, though she was only inches from him, and willing, yes, almost surely, willing to be touched.

It was working. A little switch was suddenly thrown in the ruthless mechanism called his brain. He was thinking of how her naked legs looked in the lamplight, and how delicate and full her breasts looked beneath her short silk gown.

Breasts always struck him as miracles; when you touched them and suckled them, they seemed entirely too luscious to be more than momentary—like sherbet or whipped cream, you expected them to melt in your mouth. That they stayed there, day after day, just waiting for you, was part of the whole impossibility of the female sex for him. That was all the science he knew. He bent forward, pressed his lips against her neck, and gave a little determined growl.

“Now you’ve done it,” she whispered.

“Yeah, well, it’s about time,” he said in the same deep voice. “How would you like to be carried to bed?”

“I’d love it,” she purred. “You haven’t done that since the first time.”

“Christ! How could I have been so thoughtless!” he whispered. “What kind of an old-fashioned man am I?” He shoved his left arm under her hot silky thighs and cradled her shoulders with his right, kissing her as he picked her up, secretly exultant that he didn’t lose his balance and go sprawling. But he had her—light and clinging, and suddenly feverishly compliant. Making it to the bed was a cinch.

On Tuesday, the air-conditioning men began their work. There were enough gallery roofs for every piece of equipment. Joseph, the decorator, had taken away all the French furniture that needed restoration. The beautiful old bedroom sets, all dating from the plantation era, needed no more than polishing, and the cleaning women could take care of that.

The plasterers had finished in the front bedroom. And the painters sealed off the area with plastic drapery so that they could get a clean job in spite of the dust from the work going on in the rest of the house. Rowan had chosen a light champagne beige for the bedroom walls, and white for the ceiling and the woodwork. The carpet men had come to measure upstairs. The floor men were sanding the dining room where for some reason a fancy oak floor had been laid over the old heart pine, which needed only a fresh coat of polyurethane.

Michael had checked out the chimneys himself from the roof. The wood-burning fireplaces of