Punish Me with Kisses (24 page)

She was explaining all this to Jared as rationally as she could, and then it started jumbling out of her in a mad rush of words, and then he was staring at her, listening intently, incredulous at first, not quite understanding what she meant.

"The lover," she said, "don't you see? The Dark Man of the dairy—so cold, aloof, and Suzie's terrible hurt, her pain. Then her crazy summer project, trying to catch his attention, punish him by flaunting herself, or maybe win his sympathy and inspire a renewal of his love. I knew she was carrying on too loudly, exaggerating her behavior, making sure she was heard and seen. The audience—Jesus! Listen to this." She had the diary open, was flipping through the pages, looking for words and clues. "She calls the cottage 'my arena.' On the next page she calls it 'my stage.' She writes that she's 'performing.' All the time I thought she was doing it for me, but now I see she wasn't doing that at all."

"Then what was she doing?" Jared asked, sitting down on the bed.

"Don't you see? Put yourself in front of the cottage then look back up at the house. All the bedrooms look down on you—not just mine, but my father's and mother's too. God —she tips it off all over the place, even with this stuff about Fitzgerald, 'Devereux and Nicole.' It was him she was in love with. It was him, for Christ's sake. My father."

"Wait—you're going too fast. Who's this Devereux? Who's Nicole?"

"Characters in
Tender Is the Night
. Devereux Warren and his daughter, Nicole. He freaks her out by taking her to bed."

"You're saying your father and Suzie—"

"It had to be. Look at this stuff." She opened the diary to another part. "She imagines him being sucked by a mulatto mistress. How could anyone imagine her father like that? She was always his favorite. They had these games, these little sayings they used to chant. They'd whisper together and hold hands. Then something happened, messed her up, and she quit college and started to go berserk. She did all those crazy things with Jamie
Willensen
, went to that orgy in the suburbs, tried to destroy herself, burn away her memories. Listen to the way she longs for him: 'Why doesn't he pay attention anymore?' Listen to this: 'Broken-hearted I weep and rage.' God—what agony! It's all here. She wanted to destroy herself. She wanted to be dead."

"That's what I always said."

"Cynthia thought so, too. Said Suzie had her own game going, that there was something she was trying to do. Listen to all this cryptic stuff: 'do what I have to do'; 'something's rubbed off on me'; her fascination with a cold and powerful man, her worry that Cynthia will 'mess up all my plans.' She sends him photos of the orgy hoping to infuriate him. She follows him on Fifth Avenue, weeps and rages, then searches desperately for someone else. She tries S&M to 'cauterize my wounds,' but that doesn't work—she can't shake him off. He's cold to her. Always cold. After their affair he won't touch her, so she dreams up the 'summer project,' to fuck everybody she can find right in front of him, under his windows up in Maine. Jesus—even when she's little she asks him to 'punish me with kisses.' In Maine she wants him to come down and punish her. Listen: 'Punish me for being bad.' What she really wants is for him to come down and make love to her again, cradle her, make it right. But he just sat up there watching her in silence. Just watching. And then she snapped."

She started to cry then; she couldn't help herself. It was so sickening and perverse, and also so very sad. That's what made her cry—the awful sadness of it. Suzie's terrible misery. The diary was one great cry of pain. Thinking of Suzie writing it, trying to sound tough yet crying out, then pining for her father, pining away for him, going through all those mad gyrations, torturing herself, degrading herself, waiting for him to come down and hold her, or punish her, or scream at her, or, as she'd written, waiting at least for his "applause"—all that made her cry.

I
t was eight o'clock and she was still crying, sitting on the bed amid the wreckage of her apartment, weeping, weeping, while Jared held her and whispered to her and rocked her back and forth. She couldn't control herself—the tears just flowed. She couldn't stop, so she wept on, gasping sometimes, thinking she would never stop. They must have spent another half-hour like that until finally she sat up and looked at him, and then they set to work ordering the apartment.

They put everything back where it belonged, and what was ruined—the cushion, the broken glasses and plates—they packed up into garbage bags which Jared hauled downstairs and set out on the street. Then she tried to make a salad of some leftovers in the refrigerator, but it didn't taste very good and they weren't hungry anyway, so they threw that out, too. Jared said first thing in the morning he'd call a locksmith and have an iron-rod lock installed. He suggested, too, that she Xerox the diary, and maybe put the original in a safety deposit box or someplace, because if people from Chapman Security pulled black-bag break-in jobs like this, then there was no telling what they might do next if they wanted that diary enough.

She nodded while he was saying this, still dazed by what had happened, all the revelations, and now by thoughts of incest—what that really meant. Jared was still talking, and she wasn't really listening to him until she suddenly realized that what he was saying was really terrible, much worse than anything she'd even begun to think.

"—So you see what we're up against. He could do anything. I'm thinking maybe I should go to Schrader, and have him contact the police."

"Why?"

"Well, it's damn clear now that your dad was the murderer. He shined that flashlight at me, then he knocked me down."

She wanted to scream at him to stop, but when she opened her mouth she couldn't make a sound. He was oblivious to her anyway, pacing around the apartment, talking, gesticulating, checking his points off on his fingers as if he had everything figured out, and listening to him, trying to make sense of what he was saying, she began to feel sick.

"When you said Suzie snapped, I saw it right away. Of course it wasn't Suzie who snapped. It was him. Your dad. He snapped. He was enraged by what she was doing down there, crazy on account of it. And afraid, too, of course, and with good reason—maybe she'd tell on him, tell what he'd done to her, and that could ruin him, undermine his position at Chapman, shake the faith of his stockholders, all that crap he worries about. So he's just like the guy I always imagined, except he wasn't a humiliated college jock. But it's the same thing if you look at it a certain way—the same emotions, the same crazy rage. One night he can't stand it anymore. She's taunting him, carrying on with all those guys, and, with my luck, it had to be me she was doing it with that night. It finally gets to him, so he comes down filled with lust and hate to put an end to it, end the whole thing once and for all. Maybe he figures he'll just have it out with her, or maybe he knew what he was going to do. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference now whether he killed her in madness, or very coolly just to shut her up. In the end he picked up a pair of shears, went in there and ripped her apart. And there I was, the sap, the schmuck, lying asleep on the diving board, just lying there ready to take the rap. He kills her. He stabs her again and again and again. Then she cries out and I wake up and swim back to see what's going on, and then he blinds me with the flashlight, shoves me down, runs out, pauses for a moment—that moment when you saw him—then fades into the bushes and sneaks back around to the house. While I'm grasping around in there, slipping around in all that blood, he regains his composure, washes up, turns on the siren and the lights, and then comes back out playing his father-of-the-victim role just in time for everyone to see me stumbling out with those fucking shears."

"That's not true." She'd finally found her voice. "That's not what happened," she screamed.

"Isn't it? You saw him, didn't you?"

"It wasn't him. I know it wasn't."

"You're awfully sure."

"Jared, this is crazy. You're getting off on something crazy here."

"The way I remember it, it was dark. You blinked. You could barely see. You don't know who you saw."

"You're coming on like Robinson now."

"Yeah? Well, maybe Robinson was right."

"What is this? I'm telling you it wasn't him."

"I say it
had
to be."

"It wasn't. I know it wasn't. Just like I know it wasn't you." She looked at him and saw he didn't believe her. Then he started rattling off more points.

"Look, babe, you figured it out about the two of them. But you don't take it where it has to go. Like why? What happened? Why did he cut it off with her? Out of guilt maybe, or boredom, or, most likely, because he got tired of her, or maybe she just grew up too much and he likes them young and wasn't turned on anymore. I think she got to be a nuisance with all her pining around. I think she threatened him, told him she'd tell people what he'd done. He didn't have much choice after that. He had to get rid of her. And that's just what he did."

"I'm not going to listen to this." She put her hands up to her ears.

"You goddamn well
are
going to listen." He grabbed her wrists. "Your father's a cold bastard—you always told me that. She was threatening him, saying she'd ruin him if he didn't take her back, so he had to kill her if only to shut her up. Now he finds out through his goons over at Security that Suzie kept some sort of intimate sex diary. 'Jesus,' he thinks, 'got to get hold of that.' And then he figures that maybe you really found it, so he knows he's got to get it, destroy it, burn it up. That diary's hot stuff, really ruinous, like Nixon's tapes. He's got to be careful now. Got to be crafty and cool. So when you go out to Greenwich, and he knew you were going there to see your mom, his goons wait across the street for me to leave, then they bust in here and turn the place upside down. All right—they didn't find it. So tell me what happens now? Think about it. He's got to be worried. That fucking diary—it's still around, and he doesn't know what it says. He's gone this far, sent his goon squad in. The next step's pretty obvious it seems to me. He's
got
to find out what you know, and, well, if he thinks you know what happened, then you're as dangerous to him as Suzie ever was, and you know how he handled
that
."

He picked up the diary from the bed, began reading excerpts, excited, wildly excited, like an adventurer on a manhunt, she thought, tracking, closing in on a quarry, dizzy with the thrill. He was acting triumphant about it, triumphant, putting together the puzzle, filling in the pieces, talking about her father, calling him a murderer, saying he might try and murder her. It was too much. She couldn't take it, began to scream. He told her to shut up, then they fought, she scratched at him and he wrestled her and held her down, and then, pinned on the bed, she stopped thrashing and began to weep again.

Jamie says he's tired of pimping for me. "Spades, fags, Ss and Ms," he groans, "and now you want college boys in Maine!"

"So, I'm tired of fetching and carrying for you," I tell him, "finding props, unloading your goddamn cameras, doing all the
shitwork
in the darkroom. OK?"

"So?" he asks, "like what's the bottom line?"

"The bottom fine," I tell him, "is that I'm fed up and walking out."

A real quarrel then. "I pay you a salary," he screams. "There's this thing called professional ethics."

"What bullshit, "I tell him. "All the shoots we go on, the fashion photo trip, is just fucking under another name."

"I'm teaching you," he yells. "Letting you see how I work, the secrets of my craft"

"Well," I say, "you're not exactly Richard Avedon, you know. I don't feel like I'm apprenticing to a genius quite."

He's furious! That name, Avedon, always sets him off. He hates Avedon, though he'd kiss his ass if he had the chance. He hates the notion that he's second-rung, because he knows that's what he is.

"You're a spoiled little rich bitch, " he says. "You're a fucking
nympho
. You're hung up like no one I've ever seen."

I laugh. Is that really the worst he can come up with? Of course I'm a spoiled little
nympho
bitch. I eat cocks like his for breakfast. What about SUPPER? What about LUNCH?—

L
ater she'd smile as she thought of how their faces must have looked that Monday afternoon when they finally saw Schrader at his office on upper Broadway. It would be a cynical smile, amusement at Jared's naiveté, his purity of purpose, his demands for justice, the youthful outrage in his eyes. And as for her own face, red and puffy from a night of tears and screams, she'd laugh a little bitterly at that, too, remembering how confused she'd felt, how close to madness, when the real madness was yet to come.