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I continued my lessons with Lamar Rensdale, even though I didn’t have much time to practice. I knew he was preparing to go to New York. This time he was planning to stay to teach music at Juilliard. “It’s better than eking out an existence in a place that treats any artist with scorn,” he’d explained. He’d called to tell me his good news the night before, sounding terribly excited. “I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone of my appointment, Audrina. And you must swear to go on with your music study. Someday I know I’m going to sit in an audience and say to myself that I was the one who started Audrina Adare on the road to fame.”
I hadn’t told a soul except Arden, that I’d decided to drop by Mr. Rensdale’s to say goodbye. In my pocket I had a small farewell gift, a pair of gold cuff links that had belonged to my maternal grandfather.
Once Lamar Rensdale had seemed the neatest man possible. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Now his once impeccable lawn and garden was untended and cluttered with junk. The grass needed mowing, the weeds needed pulling, and beer cans were rolling in the wind. He hadn’t even raked the leaves or torn down the old bird nests over his door. I started to knock at the back door, but at the slight touch of my knuckles, it swung open, helped by the strong gust of wind that blew in behind me.
Whenever I entered his home I’d hear him at the piano, and if he wasn’t there, he’d be in the kitchen. Since the house was very quiet, I presumed he’d gone into the city. I decided to just leave my gift with a note and then sit on the porch and wait for Arden to come round and pick me up. I began to scribble a note on his kitchen memo pad.
“Dear Mr. Rensdale,” I’d written when I heard a noise coming from the living room. I parted my lips to call out when I heard a familiar girlish giggle. Stiffening, I shuddered to think that all those lurid tales Vera had told me might be true. I tiptoed to the kitchen door and eased it open just a bit. Mr. Rensdale and Vera were in the living room. A lively log fire was crackling in the fireplace, spitting sparks up the chimney. November had just turned cold enough for fires. This afternoon was dreary, but with the fire it seemed very cozy and cheerful in that small room as Lamar Rensdale moved to put a record on the player. Sweetly it filled the house with Schubert’s “Serenade,” and now I knew I was secretly witnessing a scene of seduction.
I stood there, unable to decide what to do. It would be an hour or more before Arden came for me. It was such a long walk home and the highway was dangerous on foot. I couldn’t be so foolhardy as to hitchhike. No, I’d go sit on the back porch, despite the cold. Instead of moving, I debated back and forth as a good reason to watch what was going on in the living room.
“You see,” said Lamar Rensdale, “you can dance just fine. I told you your limp is hardly noticeable. You make too much of it, Vera. When a girl is as pretty as you are, and has your kind of figure, no man is going to notice one small flaw …”
“Then my limp is a flaw? Lamar, I was hoping you’d see me as perfect.” Her voice had a plaintive, sweet tone, reproachful yet touching. Did she really love him? How could she? She’d only just turned sixteen last week.
“Really, Vera, you are very pretty, and very appealing, and very seductive. But you’re too young for a man my age. For two years we’ve had wonderful times together and I hope you never regret one moment. But now I’m leaving. You should find a boy your own age, a boy who’ll marry you and take you away from that house you seem to hate.”
“You said you loved me, and now you’re talking as if you don’t,” wailed Vera, tears beginning to streak down
her cheeks. “You never did, did you? You just said that so I’d go to bed with you … and now that you’re tired of me, you want someone new. And I love you so much!”
“Of course I love you, Vera. But I’m not ready to get married. You know I need that professor’s assignment. I told them I wasn’t married, and they liked that. They thought I’d be more devoted to teaching. Vera, please remember that I am not the only man in the world.”
“For me you are!” she wailed louder. “I love you. I’d die for you. I gave myself to you. You seduced me and swore to me you’d always love me, and now that I’m pregnant, you don’t want me!”
Deeply shocked, I cringed backward.
Mr. Rensdale forced a controlled laugh. “My dear girl, you cannot possibly be pregnant. Don’t try that old trick with me.”
“But I am,” she wailed. When this seemed to have no effect, she moved, pouted, then snuggled closer in his arms. She pressed against him so tightly they seemed welded together. “Lamar, you do love me, I know that you do. Make love to me again, right now. Let me prove again how much I can thrill you …” I gasped to see how she ran her hands all over his back, then down to his buttocks even as she parted her lips and kissed him with such wild passion I felt giddy just watching. She did something then that I couldn’t see while the music still played, and the fire still burned.
“Don’t…” he pleaded as she became more aggressive and tugged at the zipper of his trousers. “Audrina mentioned something last night about dropping in to say goodbye …”
“Are you teaching her what you’ve taught me?” asked Vera in a sultry low voice. “I’ll bet I’m ten times better, better than—”
He grabbed her then and shook her by her shoulders as he shouted, “Stop saying things like that! Audrina is a lovely, innocent girl. The Lord alone knows how the two of you could turn out so different.”
As he continued to scold her, Vera lifted her green sweater to show her naked breasts. They bobbed as he kept shaking and she kept laughing. Even as he shook her, she unfastened her skirt and let it fall to the floor. In another second her thumbs were hooked inside her panties and off she snatched them. Lamar Rensdale couldn’t resist staring at her nudity. It seemed silly for her to keep that sweater pulled up under her armpits as she taunted. “You want me, want me, want me … so why don’t you take me—or do I have to do what I did last time… Mr. Rensdale?”
Oh! She was imitating the way I spoke. Suddenly he seized her in his arms and kissed her ruthlessly hard, bending her backwards until I thought she might break. They both fell to the floor, and there they wrestled and kissed, breathing hard with passion, even as they said ugly things to one another. Over and over rolling …
Petrified, as if seven years old and trapped in the rocking chair again, I watched until their violent sexual act was over and Vera was lying naked on top of his long, very hairy body. Tenderly she stroked his cheeks, caressed his hair, kissing his eyelids and nibbling on his ears as she murmured with a certain vicious tone, “If you don’t take me to New York with you, I’ll tell everyone you raped me—and Audrina. The police will throw you in jail, for I’m only sixteen and Audrina is only twelve. They’ll believe me, not you, and never again will you find a decent job. Please don’t make me do that, Lamar, for I love you. Really love you so much it hurts to even say mean things like that to you.” With those words she sat up, turned and began to play with the most intimate parts of his body. His moans of joy followed me out the back door, which I closed softly behind me.
Outside I breathed the cold November air deeply, trying to cleanse my lungs of the musky odor of sex that permeated all those small rooms. I was never going back. No matter what happened, I was never going back.
Silently I sat next to Arden all the way home. “Is everything all right?” he asked. “Why aren’t you talking to me?”
“Everything is fine, Arden.”
“Of course it’s not fine. If it were you’d be babbling away, telling me about Lamar Rensdale and how wonderful he is. But you’re not saying any of that—why not?”
How could I tell him what I was thinking? Vera had boasted only the other day that she’d had sex with Arden, too.
That very evening Vera jumped on me. “You were there, Audrina! You spied on us. If you tell Papa you’ll pay—I’ll see that you pay. I’ll tell him you do the same thing with Arden, and with Lamar, too!” She hurled the gold cuff links I’d left for Mr. Rensdale at me. “I went into the kitchen and found these where you left them on the kitchen table.” Menacingly she limped closer. “I’m warning you right now, if you dare to tell Papa I’ll do something so dreadful you’ll never want to look in a mirror again!”
I hated and despised her so much then that I wanted to hurt her as she threatened to hurt me. “You wanted to be my friend. What a wonderful friend you make, Vera. With you for a friend I don’t need any enemies, do I?”
“No,” she said with a slow smile that lit up her dark eyes with a sinister glow. “With me for your friend you have the best of all possible enemies. I wanted you to love me, Audrina, so you’d be hurt more when you realized how much I hate you! How much I’ve always hated you!”
