About the Author (24 page)

We had by that time consumed three martinis each, two bottles of red wine, and at least two, possibly three, ports. Consequently, the road in my headlights seemed not so much something that my car was traveling over as a strip of sheeny black fabric being pulled under my stationary wheels and wound onto an invisible spool behind me in the darkness. Finally the surrounding scenery took on the familiar features of the ballpark road, and the car was climbing the long driveway up to the house. At the top, my headlight beams swept over the hill’s glimmering overgrowth and then came to rest, like twin searchlights, on a horifying sight: Les’s 1972 Impala, parked in front of my house.

My car jerked to a halt on the driveway’s verge and quivered there, a dog who had spotted an invader. I looked at Blackie. His eyes were closed, his sharp profile tilted up on the headrest like that of a wasted corpse on its satin cushion. I looked through the windshield again. The house lights were off. After some swift calculations, I backed up a little, then veered sharply left into a narrow space off the driveway, an overgrown trail Janet’s grandfather had cut, some years ago, through the trees. Prodding the accelerator gingerly, I wriggled the car’s hindquarters into the hiding place. I cut the engine.

“Blackie?”

He did not stir. Satisfied that he was out cold, I got out of the car and started toward the house.

The hill to the right of me exhaled an endless breath of humid, heady perfume, like a drug. But I no longer felt drunk; on the contrary, my senses seemed unnaturally heightened, sharpened, on alert to pick out any threat that might lurk in the shadows and moon gleam. I even had the presence of mind to place my hand on the hood of the girl’s car. Cold. So she’d been here a while.

As I approached the veranda, my ears detected a vibration in the stillness, a wafting sonic pulse throbbing in unison with my heart. Music! It was music. And it was coming from somewhere behind the house. It was coming from Janet’s studio! I reversed my steps, then advanced along the stretch of driveway toward the little outbuilding. It loomed against the black hillside, light glowing from its one window. I drew up to this window and was hit by a concentrated cloud of acrid, sweetly nauseating marijuana smoke. I raised myself on tiptoe and peered in.

In the inverted funnel of light cast by an overhead bulb, Janet stood, one hand holding a brandy snifter, the other flying between her palette and an easeled canvas. Her brush molded the curves of a nude, limp-haired girl, buttocks turned to the viewer. Behind Janet, the red lights of the tape player’s LED displays leapt and sank in time to the music.

I readjusted my position, stumbling on a branch underfoot, then peered toward the back of the studio. My destroyer was standing on an upended crate, looking over her shoulder, her nudity shining against the dark room. Smoke curled from a joint protruding from her lips. She plucked the roach from her mouth, jumped down off the crate, then sauntered, breasts bobbing, over to Janet. She handed the roach to my wife. They stood side by side, regarding the painting.

“Fucking awesome,” the girl shouted over the music. “Now it’s your turn.”

“You want t’paint
me
?” Janet slurred. She took a toke, then tossed the roach onto the floor.

“Sure,” Les cried. “If old Ass-pick-o can do it, so can I!”

A cloud burst from my wife’s lips. Then they both collapsed in a fit of silent laughter, bending at the waist, rocking silently, clutching their sides, gaping at each other. “Ass-pick-o,” Janet gasped. “Ass-pick-o!”

“Come on,” Les said, grabbing the brush from Janet’s hand. “Strip!”

I watched, frozen, as Janet doffed her clothes. First jeans, then T-shirt, then white cotton underwear. Les, meanwhile, settled a fresh canvas on the easel and seized a rag.

“How do you want me?” Janet asked.

Les looked up. Janet was standing in the shadows beyond the bulb’s cone of light, naked like Boticelli’s goddess, one knee turned in to shield her pubic area, one hand eclipsing her pale nipples. A smile spread over Les’s feral face. “Just like that!”

She stepped over to Janet.

They were both naked now, facing each other. I studied the contrasts between them: Les’s small, curvy, bronzed body, Janet’s pale, statuesque nakedness; lank blond hair versus tumbling pre-Raphaelite tresses, an opposition echoed at the midpoint of their bodies in the patches of triangular fleece between their legs.

Les flicked the paintbrush.

“Hey!” Janet cried, looking down at the blue smear that had appeared above her navel.

“Like I said,” Les squealed, “I wanna paint
you
!”

Suddenly all was in motion: Janet backing up across the studio, her palms spread in front of her to fend off Les’s thrusts, Les pursuing with bouncy fencing poses, both women panting, silly on dope.

“Stop it!” Janet cried as Les’s brush left a splotch high on her hip.

“Okay, okay, I’ll stop,” Les said. She tucked the brush behind her ear. “Let’s clean you up.” She beckoned Janet forward into the light.

“I’ll do it.” Janet reached for the rag, but Les pulled it back.

“I made the mess,” Les said. “I’ll clean it up.”

Janet hesitated. Then, tentatively, she lifted her hands. “Okay—but use some turps.”

“I
know
,” Les said. She doused the rag, then crouched and rubbed at the smear on Janet’s hip. She used a rough gesture, like a mother cleaning dribbled food from a child’s chin. “How’s that?” she asked, glancing up. Janet looked down at her, holding back the ends of her hair with her hands.

“Fine.”

“Now,” Les said, “the other one.”

She wiped away the second paint daub on Janet’s belly with a couple of passes, dropped the cloth, then caressed the spot with her hand. I saw Janet draw in a quivering breath. Les’s hand snaked up my wife’s torso and cupped a breast. It happened so quickly, the shift, that my dazed brain took a second or two to register it, and by the time it did, Janet’s hand had already closed over Les’s, guiding the girl’s palm in a circular, caressing kneading motion.

Stunned, uncomprehending, I looked at Janet’s face. Her head had swooned back, the thick hair falling away from her pale neck, the orange light from the bulb bathing her face. And even as my numbed and sluggish brain whiplashed forward to catch up, I saw Janet’s face tilt forward, the shadows filling her eye sockets and hollowing her cheeks, her lips opening, her head drooping downward, like a peony on its bending stem, to meet Les’s tipped-up profile, merging with it.

I dropped onto my heels and clapped my hands over my mouth.

Then I was bending, groping in the darkness at my feet for the tree branch. I seized it, straightened, and, distrusting the evidence of my distorted senses, took one last look through the window. Their bodies, as I watched, seemed to become one writhing, undulating mass: Janet’s white arms encircling the girl’s neck, breasts flattened together, pelvises interlocked and knees interlaced. Les’s hand slithered down my wife’s flank, molding a callipygian curve, fingers curling around to part Janet’s petals, lingering there a moment, then disappearing into her inviolable center. Janet, her knees trembling, let out a sharp cry and buried her face in the girl’s neck.

Turning toward darkness, shouldering my club, I scuttled to my left, making for the door of the studio. My brain, finally up to speed, now overtook my senses, so that my retinas burst with stark, strobe-lit images of the imagined events to come: the studio door being torn open; the girl whirling around to gape at me with terrified eyes; the sodden tree branch crashing against Les’s skull; Janet screaming as she watched; the bloodied branch dropping limply from my hand.

In my haste to make these images real, I stumbled over a stone in the blackness, fell to one knee, then wobbled back to my feet. I was finally reaching forward for the door handle when I felt something paw feebly at my back.

I turned. A dead person, newly resurrected, gaped at me beseechingly, the skeletal white face smeared with dirt and leaves and trickling blood. “Help,” it said in a cracked whisper. “My head.”

I straight-armed this apparition away, but it persisted in groping at me in the dark, clutching at my arm. I turned back to it. It smiled.

Not Stewart—Blackie!

“I fell,” he gasped.

I saw the wound high in the middle of his forehead. I winced, and immediately reality rushed in.

I dropped my weapon, seized his padded shoulder, and clamped my hand over his mouth. “Janet’s busy,” I hissed. I swung him around and marched him away from the studio. He struggled weakly in my grasp, arms windmilling, snuffling under my rigid hand, which still gripped his fleshless mouth. “Not now,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Just a little further.”

We were still on the driveway, heading for my car, when the music abruptly stopped and I heard Janet’s voice cry, “No, Les!” I craned around to look over my shoulder. The studio door burst open, and light fanned over the ground. Janet backed through the doorway, clutching her T-shirt against her naked body.

I tightened my grip on Blackie, then lunged sidelong at the cedar hedge bordering the driveway. The gnarly branches bent and then gave, and we crashed through in a shower of tiny glinting green needles. “Shhh,” I said as I pulled him down beside me.

“I
told
you, that’s enough!” Janet shouted.

I could make out, through the dense hedge, Les, her naked body a pale streak against the darkness. She advanced slowly toward my wife, who backed toward us down the driveway.

“Come on, Jan, you fucking tease!”

“I’m serious,” Janet countered. “Cal will be home soon.”

“Don’t use
him
as an excuse,” the girl snarled. “It’s three in the morning. Where is he? Screwing some girl, just like I told you!”

Janet halted perhaps three feet from where Blackie and I crouched behind the hedge. I tightened my grip on his mouth.

“Les,” Janet said, standing her ground. “Please
go
.”

Les drew up to her, then touched my wife’s hair. “C’mon, Jan,” she said softly. “You know you want to.”

“No,” Janet said, pushing the girl’s hand away. “I don’t know anything. Except I want you to go!” She started crying. “Leave me alone!” she shouted, on a rising note of hysteria.

“Hey,” Les said, taking a step backward, obviously taken aback by Janet’s vehemence. “Chill, Jan. It’s cool.” She allowed Janet to flee into the house. The back door slammed, and I heard the crunch of the lock. The kitchen light came on briefly, then was extinguished. After a moment, Les shrugged, turned, and walked up the driveway toward the studio. Utter silence. Perhaps a minute later, Les sauntered back down the driveway. She had put her jeans and T-shirt on but was carrying her shoes under one arm. Passing by the pantry window, she paused and banged on the pane with the side of her fist. “Sweet dreams, honey!” she called out. “You fucking cunt-teaser,” she added under her breath. Then she marched off. The sound of her engine racked the silent hillside. She drove off.

I removed my hand from Blackie’s mouth. His throat rattled with a snore: asleep. I stood, hauled him to his feet, and dragged him through the hedge onto the driveway. Then I “escorted” him down to my car and tumbled him headfirst onto the passenger seat.

“—the fug’s going on?” he mumbled as I climbed in beside him.

I backed out onto the driveway. The dashboard clock read 2:57. I started down the hill. A few minutes later, I was pulling him into the Pleasant View’s lobby. The desk clerk, a young man with a constellation of whiteheads around his nostrils, gaped at Blackie’s filthy face, torn suit, and blood-spattered shirtfront.

“He’s drunk,” I said. “And he fell.”

All curiosity drained from the boy’s features. He selected a key from the pegboard, and gestured for us to follow. Upstairs, he opened room 20 and stepped aside. I hauled Blackie in, then rolled him onto the bed. He came to rest on his back, limbs spread like the points of a star. Downstairs again, I signed the register and handed over forty bucks for the room. “Check on him in a couple of hours,” I instructed, stuffing an extra ten into the clerk’s hand. “If there’s anything wrong, call me.” I scribbled my number in the guest book. Then I hurried out to the car.

I took the road home at sixty miles per hour. I did not see the town streaming past. My eyes were still filled with the sight of the girl’s hands on my wife’s body. Of course, there was no question of my blaming Janet. Stoned, drunk, she’d been seduced by the serpent. None of it was her fault. It was
my
fault. I had driven her into the girl’s arms. I had invaded her once-innocent world with my seeping crime, and now it had spread like a bloodstain, blighting, befouling both our lives. I was racing home to confess everything to her. This was not as noble as it may sound. By now I knew that it would be only a matter of time before Les told her everything. It was better that Janet should hear it all from me. That way there was, perhaps, still some shred of hope that she would forgive me.

The porch light was out, the house dark. Slipping down the hallway that led to the back of the house, I was surprised to see that our bedroom light was on. I had assumed that I would have to wake her.

I pushed in through the half-closed door. Janet was bending over at the foot of the bed. Dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans, her hair wet from a shower, she was cramming articles of clothing into a suitcase.

“What are you doing?”

She looked at me, her cheeks streaked with tears. “I have to go away,” she said. She closed the case.

“ ‘Go away’? Where? What are you talking about?” For a sickening moment, I pictured her moving in with Les, the two of them setting up at the Yellow House.

“My parents’.” She sniffled and ran the back of her wrist under her nose. “I’m going to stay with them for a while. Until school starts.”

I moved forward to reach for her, but she retreated toward the window. “No!” she said. “Please, I don’t want anyone to touch me!”

“Janet,” I said, “I’ve got something to tell you. It’s important. I don’t know where to start.”