Punish Me with Kisses (29 page)

"You should see me, Jamie. It would be in your interest to see me now."

"Sorry," he said, "I don't follow that." He was trying to be cool but she sensed his tension, and the barest trace of a stutter in his voice.

"Suzie left a diary. There're lots of episodes involving you."

"Look," he said, "is this some kind of blackmail? Maybe I ought to get my lawyer over here."

She laughed. "Don't be stupid. I'm rich, a hundred times richer than you'll ever be. I just want to talk. Can't you deal with that?"

A brief silence. He was thinking it over. "All right," he said, "ring the bell. I'll buzz you in."

He was waiting for her at the top of the stairs, a slim man wearing tight faded jeans and a silk shirt open to expose his chest. His hair was cut short and neat.
The butch look
, she thought as she approached and began to size him up. When she reached the top and they shook hands she saw a network of tiny lines crisscrossing his face. As if someone had thrown a stone at a piece of safety glass, she thought. She refigured him for forty-five, and decadent as hell.

"So, the ugly duckling sister. We meet at last in the flesh."

She noticed his suede couch and unable to help herself, began to laugh. "Ah, the famous couch," she said, "in the flesh, too, so to speak."

He squinted. "What's the big deal about the couch?"

"My former boyfriend doubted you cleaned it up."

"What the hell are you talking about." He set his hands on his hips.

"It was in the diary. Suzie wrote it up. About this friend of yours, Dave I think, who jerked off on it. This is the same piece of furniture,
right
?"

"Christ!" He threw himself into a chair. "Christ—she wrote about
that
?"

"Lots more. Lots of other things."

"Oh, Jesus! I bet she did." He offered her a joint. He seemed a little in awe.

"Were you really fond of Suzie?" she asked, inhaling, not bothering to pass it back.

"Sure. We were chums. Then she deserted me. Quarreled and walked out. She shouldn't have. Wouldn't have gotten herself killed if she'd stayed. But she wanted to go. I told her not to. She told me to screw myself."

"You two were having quite a wild time."

"Depends on what you mean by wild." He paused. "You know, Penny—this isn't really fair. You know all sorts of things about me, but I don't know exactly what."

"Want me to tell you?"

"Yeah. Maybe you should."

"The embarrassing things?"

"Nothing embarrasses me."

"Good. That's really good, because the average guy would be pretty embarrassed I think. OK—well, you took her to an orgy in Scarsdale or someplace and made a lot of split-beaver shots.
Right
?" He nodded. "Still have them?"

"Burned the negatives the moment I heard she was killed."

"You could have made a fortune peddling them, I bet."

"Maybe. But that's not my style."

"Oh? Really? You must be pretty hot shit then." She yawned, didn't know why she was acting this way, pretending she was Suzie, acted bored, scornful of his integrity. "Let's see —I guess the thing that should make you squirm the most is the time you both went downtown someplace and bought some kind of leather gizmo to tie around your cock."

He turned away. "What a little cunt she was to write all that stuff down."

"So—you
are
embarrassed. Forget it. No
one'll
ever know." She patted him on the knee, couldn't believe she was coming on this way. "Now that we're through all that, I'd like to hear if you were just using each other or if you really liked her like you claim."

"Isn't it kind of weird after all these years for you to come around so suddenly and ask?"

"The diary only turned up a couple weeks ago."

"And that made you think of her again?"

"
Right
. There's a lot about you in it, and a lot about some other guy she was hung up on. An older guy. Know anything about that?"

"Vaguely rings a bell, but she didn't reveal herself all that much. We had a lot of fun together, we balled and we played around, did some pretty wild scenes, did use each other, I guess. But she kept her problems to herself, and that's what I did, too. She was a good-time girl—
sort of
. That was the front she put on anyway. You remind me of her. Not the way you look exactly." He squinted at her, the Great Photographer routine, she thought. "Yeah—you
could
be sisters, though your faces aren't that much alike. No, it's something else. The way you come on. Something in your voice, too. And your mannerisms. Yeah—you bring it all back somehow."

They studied each other for a moment, both of them smiling, he challenging, she meeting his gaze head-on.

"Someone really coming over?" she asked. He nodded. "Guess I ought to be going then."

He didn't stand. "You can stay if you want. It's a guy. If you like each other—well, we could have a three-way if you think you could manage that."

God—it was like stepping right into Suzie's diary
.

"Tempt you?"

"Not very much," she said.

He was smirking, trying to goad her into a scene, saying, in effect, "Prove you're really Suzie's match." She yawned again, deliberately, so as to make sure he got the point.

"Three-ways, four-ways—people still do that sort of stuff?"

"Some of us," he said. "And I guess some of us have seen it all."

She nodded, smiled. He smiled back. They made a date to see each other the following night. Walking home she thought:
he's really foul; how much Suzie must have hated herself to have done all those things with him
.

T
he next day during lunch hour she went to the perfume counter at Bloomingdale's, asked for the sampler bottle of
Amazone
, dabbed a drop on her wrist. She was about to buy an ounce when she remembered she already had one at home, the bottle that had been stashed along with the wallet and the diary in Suzie's hiding place in Maine.
Wait till tonigh
t, she thought,
this'll really blow his mind
.

It did.

"Wow," he said, "you even smell the same."

"But do we screw the same? That's the question.
Right
?"

"Yeah," he admitted. "That would be good to know."

"Tell me how she balled."

He scratched his head. "Difficult to explain."

"You can show me."

"Show me first."

She shrugged. "OK." She started taking off her clothes. He watched, smiling, then undressed himself.

"Well?" she asked him afterwards.

"Not the same. No, I don't think so—not the same."

"How different, then?"

"Can't remember back that far."

"Oh—I'm sure you can, Jamie. Just close your eyes and try to relive those glorious, comradely days."

After ten minutes of very technical questions (Did Suzie sigh? Squirm? Cry out? Pump her pelvis? What was her favorite position? Did she grasp tightly? Scratch? Snarl? Like to kiss?) Jamie became annoyed. "Look—what the hell is this, anyway? Am I supposed to be giving Little Sister a sex education course?"

"Too technical for you?" She reached for him, found him limp.

"Yes, as a matter of fact."

"Well, sorry," she said, "but I'm really interested in finding out how my sister liked to screw."

"Isn't that a little on the
sicky
side?"

Penny shrugged. "Maybe. And maybe not so
sicky
as someone who's into cock restraints."

He rolled away from her. From the other side of the bed he glared.

"Know something—you
are
like her. You're just as much a bitch."

"Well—" She smiled and then, suddenly, she knew just what to say. The words just came out of her. She remembered them from that telephone conversation she'd overheard three and a half years ago. She even imitated Suzie's voice. It came out almost exactly the way Suzie had said it to him then: "I'm a bitch.
OK
? If it makes you feel any better just think of me as a bitch.
OK
?
All right
? Feel better now, Jamie Sweets? And I'll just think of you as a bitch, too.
OK
?"

She got out of his bed, started getting dressed. She could feel the loathing coming off of him in waves.

"
Cunt
!
" he hissed, "I'll tell you the difference. She was a terrific lay. You screw like a corpse."

She blew him a kiss.

"W
hy did I do it? Why? What's happening to me?"

Dr. Bowles didn't answer. Penny was sitting on a yellow cushion propped against the wall. Dr. Bowles was in her chair, a kitten nestled in her lap. She was nursing it from a bottle.

"Do I really want to be like her? That sounds so glib, but that's what it means, doesn't it? Talking to him like that. Forcing him to tell me how she made love. I tried to get Jared to tell me, and when he refused I knew that was the end. But using her perfume! God! I wept when I smelled it in the
poolhouse
last month. Am I that cold now? I'm scared. I don't know what's going on."

"We'll work it out," said Dr. Bowles. "In time we'll work it out. It's not enough to say you're trying to be like Suzie. The question is why you'd
want
to be."

"It started with the diary."

"You still read it, don't you? Do you think there's something in there, something you haven't seen?"

"Yes," she said, realizing for the first time the truth of what she was about to say. "There
is
something, something between the lines. The explanation for everything. Even the murder. I think that's in there, too."

"No," said Dr. Bowles, "you unlocked the secret of the diary when you identified the Dark Man. Now you can't deal with it. Oh, you accept it intellectually. You think: 'OK, she and my father had an affair, and then he broke her heart.' But it's too terrible, too frightening, such a forbidden thing, too terrible, too forbidden to deal with. So now you reread the diary and go to people like this photographer, hoping you'll find another explanation, something less painful to bear."

"Maybe—" Penny thought about it. Perhaps Dr. Bowles was right. She'd reread the diary so many times, looking for something—she didn't even know exactly what.

"You're using people, Penny—trying to get them to help you act out your sister's life. It's as if you're trying to set back the clock, go back to that time when you think your lives diverged. Now you want to go back and follow her road, and that's a stressful thing to do. There's a part of you that thinks that if you continue like this you'll end up getting killed."

It was a revelation. She was dazzled by the insight and the astute way Dr. Bowles had brought it out. "Yes," she said, "and that would relieve my guilt about the fact that she was killed and I survived."

"You do feel guilty about that."

"I guess I always have."

"Then maybe you should go on. Deep emotions are controlling you. If you yield to them as you're doing now I think in time they'll self-destruct."

Afterwards, when the session was over, they sat, as always, facing one another, talking quietly, not about deep subconscious things, but little things in life, and cats.

"Your kittens are growing now. Isn't it fun to watch them grow?"

"They wrestle all the time."

"Sure," said Dr. Bowles. "They're wild. Cats are never tamed like dogs. Even when they're brought up in an apartment they're driven by a primitive feline need to kill for food." The psychiatrist looked matronly cradling the kitten in her arms, urging it to drink from the baby's bottle. "Touch him, Penny. Feel him purr. You can purr like that, too, once you've worked things out. Tell me—how are you and James getting along? Are things better between you now?"