Chapter 14: Maestro

I WAS PREPARED to pay a whole bundle of money Saturday night for my date with Ronda. I dressed in my three-piece gray flannel suit with a white shirt and tie, my fedora, and my dancing shoes. Not that those were exclusively for dancing, but they were the shoes that I kept polished and ready for special occasions.

Ronda was stunning in a little black dress—only this was like no little black dress I’d ever seen. It had three-quarter length puffy sleeves and a plunging neckline. The skirt was full enough to dance in, but hung fairly straight. It was between that neckline and the waist that the scandal happened. It was an open gold brocade. By open, I mean it was cut out around the brocade so you saw her creamy white skin from just the bottom of the curve of her breast down past her navel. She wore a long wool cape that would keep her warm or conceal whatever we were doing beneath it. Of course, she wore black high heels, FFNs, and black gloves. So yummy!

We went downstairs after kissing our girlfriends and our little girl goodnight, and found Deke waiting with a limo—considerably larger than the town car he’d always picked me up with when needed. It was soon revealed that the reason was Jordan, Nadia, and Adele already seated in the back. They greeted us with glasses of champagne and wishes for Ronda’s happy birthday.

We headed up Michigan Avenue to Wacker and Deke pulled up to one of the many imposing buildings on the Magnificent Mile. A doorman let us through and we boarded an elevator with a uniformed guy in it to punch the buttons and open the doors for us. We went up to the twenty-sixth floor and stepped into the lobby of an impressive club. Jordan was recognized by the maître d’ immediately. They had a brief conversation and then Jordan turned to me.

“We don’t intend to infringe on your private date,” he said. “We’ll have separate tables. I encourage you to enjoy your meal and drinks and dance your hearts out. You’ll discover there are no prices on your menus. Order whatever you want. Several of your patrons are members of this club—in fact, I think they all are. This is where your patronage started. They are providing tonight as a birthday gift to Miss Ronda, and also as a late celebration of your own twenty-first. Enjoy!”

The maître d’ returned to lead Jordan and his party to their table, then came back for Ronda and me. We had a very nice table near the dance floor. A band I recognized was setting up. Jordan had mentioned they would start playing sometime between nine and ten. I guess it was expected that people would be finished with their dinners by then.

“Happy birthday, my love,” I said raising a toast with the Campari Spritz I introduced Ronda to. She was delighted.

“Remind me to thank Lady Jane the next time I see her,” Ronda said. Who knew? Perhaps she would meet her Ladyship one day.

Seeing a menu with no prices on it was a little disconcerting. I kept trying to guess what my patrons would be expecting to pay. Ronda had no such difficulty.

“This is so exciting!” she said. “Look! They have Chateaubriand for two. We could have a Caesar salad to start. I know you don’t like caviar, but what about a shrimp cocktail as an appetizer? And look! They have both Bananas Foster and Cherries Jubilee for dessert. Nate, this is so wonderful! I love you!”

I guess that was decided. Everything she mentioned was “Dining for Two.” When our waiter arrived with a tray of bread and cheese, I decided we’d be eating for a long time. We ordered the shrimp cocktail appetizer and Caesar salad, Chateaubriand medium rare, and he left before I got to dessert. I supposed the main courses needed to be prepared first. A cocktail waitress brought us fresh spritzes and I sat back to enjoy the most excellent company of my dear Ronda.

We talked about everything that came to mind.

“You should take the civil service exam with me next fall,” she suggested.

“I’m not studying anything like what you are doing!” I said.

“It’s required for all government jobs,” she explained. “You’d be surprised what they need. I’ve seen listings for accountants and bookkeepers, for example. I’m going to suggest Anna take the test, too. And I’ve seen at least one listing for a photographer. Who knows? Maybe we can get assigned to the same place!”

“Hmm. Bookkeeper, photographer, ambassador. Do they have listings for a Playboy bunny?”

“No, silly. At least not officially. But if any two of us got assigned somewhere together, we could take the other three as our family. Can’t you just imagine seeing Europe together? Or Japan?”

“It does sound exciting. Do I need to study something for it?”

“It’s supposed to be like one of those intelligence exams that measure your IQ, only this measures your suitability for government work.”

“So, the opposite of IQ?” I snorted.

“There is a booklet about how to prepare for the test. I’ll bring it home and maybe this summer we can find time to study it in Canada.”

“What are we going to do if we get out of college and have regular jobs?” I asked. “How are we going to keep the place in Stratford going?”

“We have a lot of things to figure out. I think we should get Anna and Patricia to help us list out everything that’s important to us and then rate every possibility according to those criteria.”

“I can tell you that right now: The most important thing is to keep our family together. If I can’t find work as a photographer, I’ll work as a gofer in an ad agency or something. It wouldn’t make a difference as long as we were all together.”

“I love you, Nate.”

Apparently, everything we ordered after the shrimp cocktail got prepared tableside. A chef came out and prepared our Caesar before scooping it out of his big bowl onto our salad plates. The damn salad was almost a meal in itself.

We weren’t finished with the salad when the chef—a different one—came to our table with the Chateaubriand. He displayed it for us on a kind of cutting board. It was surrounded by garlic mashed potatoes, and covered in Béarnaise sauce. He sliced it next to our table and prepared a plate for each of us, garnishing it with roasted asparagus. I used my steak knife, but I think I could have cut it with the side of my fork, it was that tender.

While we were eating, the band started playing and a few people got up to dance. I was slowing down and came to the realization that we were not going to finish this fantastic piece of meat, just as the tom toms in the band started a familiar beat. Then they were joined by a trumpet. I looked at Ronda and her eyes were wide.

“Sing, sing, sing,” she whispered. It was one of our favorite swing tunes and I jumped up to get her out of her chair and lead her to the dance floor. We danced to a lot of fifties and sixties music, but both of us bemoaned not having been around for the height of jazz and swing from the twenties to the forties. I wrapped her around me, spun her, dipped her, and rolled her. And that was just the warmup. Once we started, neither of us wanted to leave the dance floor. I think we went for an hour or more before we finally looked at each other and said, “Water!”

We got back to the table and it had been cleared. It was reset with our drinks and glasses of water. The drinks were fresh.

“I love you so much!” she said as we looked across the table. “Nothing could make this night better!”

We toasted each other and another waitress approached the table with a birthday cake and lit candles. She set it in the middle of the table.

“They wouldn’t let me jump out of one,” the waitress said. We looked up at the sound of her voice.

“Fifi!” I shouted. Ronda beat me out of her chair, wrapping Adrienne in her arms and starting a kiss that made me think I might need to clear the table for them.

“I was wrong! I was wrong!” Ronda shouted. “It got better!”

I finally got my turn to kiss our mistress and then pulled a chair to the table so she could sit down. The candles were getting low.

“Make a wish!” she said.

“How could we wish for more?” I asked. Adrienne counted to three and Ronda and I blew out the candles.

If I’d looked at the waitress at all, instead of being focused on the candles, I’d have realized she was much more elegantly dressed than a waitress. And around her neck sparkled the rhinestone collar.

That was the cue for the party to get started all over the club. Drinks came our direction—more than we could possibly consume. People started coming by our table to congratulate us. I think every man in the club asked either Ronda or Adrienne to dance. Most they turned down, but when I was with one, the other often accepted a dance. Then I was tapped on the shoulder.

“May I have this dance?” Nadia asked.

“Certainly!” I said.

I saw Jordan leading Adele to the dance floor. I don’t think Nadia is quite as good a dancer as Ronda, but holding her in my arms brought back some great memories from less than two months previously when she and Adele had come to the studio. Yeah. Nadia might be twice my age, but she was sexy as a teenager.

I also danced with Adele a little later and she squeezed me rather tightly.

“This would be almost unbearable if it weren’t for getting Nadia for the rest of the night when we leave here. There are so many men here!” she whispered in my ear. If anything, she gripped me more tightly.

“Why did you come out?” I asked.

“Jordan insisted. I can rule over Nadia, but if Jordan says to suck his dick, I get on my knees,” she sighed. “Fortunately, he never asks that. You are still the only man who has stuck his dick in me in the past ten years.”

“I’d say that’s a great honor, Adele. I don’t and never did want to hurt you,” I said.

“Oh, Nate, don’t you understand? I needed it as badly as Nadia did. We’re trying not to be too eager to come back for another session. By the way, Jordan loved the photo. He had us strip and reenact everything for him. He actually came in Nadia and then made me clean her up! So, yours is the only dick that’s been in me, but I have had come in me,” she giggled. “I know you like to dance better than I can, and Jordan is waving me over to take Nadia off his hands. I’ve a feeling he has an eye on your mistress. And here comes Miss R. You have better things to do than hold a lesbian man-hater.”

She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and darted over to take Nadia from Jordan as Jordan turned to Adrienne. I spun Ronda into my arms as the band started “In the Mood.”

About two in the morning, both Ronda and Adrienne were sitting at the table with me and nodded that they’d like to leave. I sought out Jordan to thank for the evening and found him sitting in the lounge with some other guys, smoking cigars. I nearly reached for my pipe and decided I should get my girls someplace where I could undress them.

“Jordan, thank you for arranging this evening to celebrate Ronda’s birthday,” I said. “It’s been a very special evening.”

“I merely made the suggestion to your patrons and they jumped at the opportunity,” he said, motioning to the five men sitting with him

So, these were my patrons. I’d never actually come face to face with them, at least knowing who they were. I’d seen some of them before. I knew some of them had been at either my performances with Charity and Elizabeth or my ‘audition’ with Rose. I wasn’t sure how I should react.

“Thank you, gentlemen. For everything,” I said.

“Faith well-placed. We all stand to make a great deal of money from the movie you inspired. We apologize for not having recognized your twenty-first birthday,” one of the guys said. He was one I’d seen in Las Vegas at the studio. “Keep up the good work.”

“Thank you, again,” I said. “Uh ... my girlfriend and my mistress are waiting for me. If you’ll excuse me.”

“Deke is waiting downstairs for you,” Jordan said. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back for us. Goodnight!”

“Goodnight,” I said and backed out of the room.

I collected Ronda and Adrienne, my hat, and Ronda’s cape. Adrienne had a fur I helped her into. Deke was waiting and took us for the short drive to the Blackstone. He handed me our overnight bag and I escorted the ladies inside.

“I suppose I need to check in,” I laughed. “I hope they have our room.”

“I’ve already taken care of it, Master,” Adrienne said. She handed me the key and we went upstairs.

“How did you manage to pull off that wonderful surprise and even get checked into the hotel for us?” Ronda asked.

“I had a chat with Miss A,” Adrienne said. “She approved the plan and set things up for me.”

“But how did you get into the club? Who brought you?” I asked.

“Oh. I have a key.”

That shut me up, but Adrienne wasn’t done.

“I visited here with my sponsor soon after I turned twenty-one. He gave me a key for my birthday present. I used it occasionally while we were together, but when he got sick, I lost interest until now. I talked to him this week, and he approved giving the key to you. Of course, I’ll join you here whenever you want.”

Adrienne gave me the engraved key. It wasn’t really a key to a door or anything, but a kind of symbolic key with the name of the club and a number. Maybe one day I’d be rich enough to go there on my own. I kissed Adrienne and found Ronda busy unzipping our mistress’s gown. When it fell to the floor, Adrienne fell to her knees.

“How may Fifi serve my master and mistress?” she asked.

“Fifi may get us undressed and into bed. There, she may put her face between my legs and get her bottom ready for her master!” Ronda said. My girlfriend was still partying and we’d both had enough to drink to be a bit silly. But Adrienne went straight to work and got us into bed. And the truth was that I loved sinking my cock into her butt while she and Ronda licked each other to orgasms.

Adrienne was on an early flight back to LA on Monday. Ronda and I got home Sunday evening and fell into the arms of our girlfriends for exhausted sleep. And then we were all back to school and our routine.

I had decided on my directed vision tableau and Lance encouraged me to get it put together and not wait until the end of the semester. We’d been practicing staging models every week. Lance would bring in half a dozen models each Wednesday and then he would have us each stage a tableau and we’d all photograph it. There were only eight in the class, so we could get a tableau from most of us each Wednesday. If we didn’t get through everyone, those who were missed started the series the next Wednesday.

We usually had four female models and two males. Several repeated and as we got to working week after week, we got to know the models and they responded quickly to our ideas. Lance would call the first person forward and say something like, “The right to vote,” which was a popular subject these days. Nixon had signed a law giving eighteen-year-olds the right to vote, but the court held that it only applied to national elections and not local elections. So, congress had gotten busy and wrote an amendment to the constitution granting the right to vote at eighteen in all national and local elections. We were watching it pretty closely as they debated the wording. They’d vote on it soon.

Illinois had already voted on an amendment to the State Constitution in December and rejected it. So, it was still a pretty hot issue. Leslie got that one and did a great job of staging it more as a women’s suffrage scene than trying to distinguish ages among the models.

I got one the first Wednesday of March that really ticked me off. Lance just turned to me and said, “Victory in Vietnam.”

I just stared at him while the models waited for me to pose them. I recognized a couple of them from previous sessions, and Shirley, the model who’d come to me for a fun session near the end of January was one of them. We had fifteen minutes to get our models into the positions we wanted them in and to present our tableau. I called them together to talk.

“Maybe you don’t know, but I’m a pacifist. A draft resister. I lost my best friend in Vietnam when I was still in high school. Now I’m helping raise his little girl that he didn’t even know he’d fathered. The whole issue of thinking we’re ever going to have a victory in Vietnam really pisses me off.”

“I’m with you,” Martin said. He was a tall guy and I’d noticed he wore a peace symbol. “Whatever you want, I’ll do it.”

“If I went with my gut, I’d just have a pile of dead bodies,” I said.

“We could do that,” Shirley said, “but you’d want uniforms, wouldn’t you? We don’t have that.”

“Hmm. You know how I work, Shirley. For the record, I promise not to touch any of you inappropriately. But I’m thinking I might get you into a position where you are touching each other.”

“Pile of bodies?” one of the women chuckled. “We’d about have to.”

“But since we don’t have uniforms, I’d like to do it nude.”

“What!?” one of the women exclaimed. “I mean, I’ve modeled nude before, but how does this play into the theme? And I’ve never had to touch other models ... um ... intimately when we were posing.”

“I don’t want groping and humping on each other,” I said. “If it’s a problem, I’ll come up with something else.”

“I’m in,” Shirley said. “I can see what you are going for and I like it.”

“Yeah, I can see it, too,” said the woman who had been shocked. Donna, I think her name was. “I’m in, as long as I don’t actually have a cock poking me somewhere.”

“I’ll put the guys, pretty much on the bottom layer, face down. Will that suffice?”

“Whatever. I’m not a prude,” Donna said.

I took a quick poll of the models and they agreed.

“Okay. We’ve taken up ten of our fifteen minutes discussing it,” I said. “That means, strip. Clothes over there.”

Once we had a unified idea, things went fast. Martin and Al hit the floor behind our little screen. I had Al lie partially across Martin. Then Donna and the other two women interlaced on top. I kept checking with Martin to make sure he was okay with the weight, but he was pretty husky and said it wasn’t a problem. Then I led Shirley to the top of the heap. When it came down to it, she was the only one with her bits exposed to the audience. She gave me permission to hold her while she got balanced and I checked with everyone to make sure they were still breathing.

“After years of sending unwilling teens to their death in Vietnam, they declared victory. And like in every war, the victorious stood on the bodies of the fallen,” I announced.

I pulled the curtain on the tableau and everyone immediately started snapping their pictures. The bodies were piled, but Shirley stood on top, weakly holding up her hand in a peace sign. Odd that the peace sign—the index and middle finger held up in a V—was the same sign Churchill used to promote victory in Europe and that Nixon used when he won the election. I ran to my tripod and tripped the lens on the Hasselblad. The class applauded and I quickly pulled the curtain and started disassembling the tableau, helping Shirley down and each of the others to their feet.

Shirley started the parade to get her clothes, first stopping to give me a big naked hug. I was surprised to find Donna giving me a hug as well. Then each of the other two women, one who had tears in her eyes. Al caught me in a hug, too, and was followed by Martin. The guys had quickly gotten their boxers on before they hugged me. I didn’t really care. Guys can be so worried about what is manly and what isn’t.

“Now let’s discuss what we just saw,” Lance said. “What are the qualities that we witnessed?”

It was a critique, and we all learned something from it. One comment was that with so few actors, it would have been good to have some kind of support to elevate the pile more, like possibly draping them on a hill or even a set of stairs. I liked that idea. Another wanted an explanation of the nudity in this kind of scene. I talked a little about the lack of uniforms and that the nudity stripped everyone down to equal rank and didn’t differentiate between sides in the conflict. He nodded. Leslie asked if I’d considered just draping Shirley on top of the heap with a hand weakly raised because no one would come out alive in the so-called victory.

I learned a lot.

I was having some difficulty finding a suitable location for my final tableau. I’d found two models who were willing to work with me after they looked over my sketches. I’m no artist like my sister, but I can draw out positions pretty well. I’d taken an art class in high school, eventually.