Punish Me with Kisses (36 page)

The crowds were thicker as he crossed Times Square. There were camera-watch-binocular discount stores, and restaurants offering steak dinners for $9.99. Banners announced close-out prices on "odds and ends." Old men stared aimlessly from cavernous cafeterias grotesquely lit by fluorescent lights.

At the corner of Eighth and Forty-second, in the midst of utter sleaziness, he paused as if deciding what to do. There were sex shops all around, hookers and male hustlers speaking over telephones in
doorless
booths. He turned uptown on Eighth, walked several blocks, then went into a porno cinema. She waited a few minutes until she was sure he was seated, then bought herself a ticket from a whiskered old lady cashier.

The lobby was dark, the theater small, smelling of stale smoke. She stood at the rear looking over the heads of the men inside, inspecting them row by row while hearing moaning and sucking noises coming from the screen. There weren't many customers. She spotted him right away. She moved down the opposite passageway, took a seat apart two rows behind and a dozen seats to the side, then watched him, his face immobile, cold and hard, his familiar squared-off jaw illuminated by light reflected off the screen.

The movie was horrible, tawdry, badly made, the print scratched, the soundtrack, barely audible, consisting of sighs and moans, whispers of "suck me" and "fuck me" enunciated by despicable men. She couldn't follow the story. It seemed to be about two girls, roommates, who had a variety of adventures with ghastly looking males. Mostly she watched her father, studied his iron jaw, the immobility of his face. She searched his profile for some response —a moan, heavy breathing, some indication that he was involved or moved, but all she could find was the same hard grimace she'd known all her life, that cold mask she'd dreamt about, that mask that Suzie, at the end, had so desperately tried to crack.

Finally, after forty minutes or an hour, she saw him gather up his coat. He stood and began to leave. When he reached the back of the theater she followed him out. She reached the street just as he turned the next corner and headed east on Forty-fifth.

She rushed after him, nearly running down an old wino who growled at her as she brushed by. "Hey! Hey you!
You
!" a black pimp yelled. She walked faster to get away. She reached the corner just in time to see her father enter a doorway a third of the way down the block. "
Hey!
" the pimp said. "
Hey!
Stop a minute. I want to talk to
you
." She walked faster, saw her father had entered a hotel, one of the innumerable fleabags clustered around Times Square where whores kept rooms and lonely old people lived on welfare checks—the sort of place Jared had stayed his first few weeks in New York.

She passed, glancing in. She could see him chatting with the clerk. He was employing the same bantering manner she'd seen him use so many times with waiters, golf caddies, chauffeurs. The pimp was still following her, calling. She ran up to Broadway, lost him in the crowds, then circled the block and passed the hotel just in time to see her father mount a stairs behind the desk.

She stopped, wondered what to do. Should she follow? There was a risk of running into him, and she couldn't just barge in and interrogate the clerk. What was he doing? Were there whores upstairs? Did he act out his fantasies with them? She didn't know what was driving her except a tight breathlessness, a need. She didn't care if he saw her now. She didn't care about anything. He was a monster, a pervert—she was going to find him out.

She brushed past the clerk, mounted the stairs, found herself in a passageway leading toward a door. There was a sign on the wall, neatly lettered, directing her toward "Martha's Massage." She entered. A girl sat behind a desk, cute and cheap looking, a girl about her age. A black man, huge and muscular whom she figured for a bouncer, looked her over as she approached.

"Sorry, honey," said the girl, even before she could open her mouth. "No openings here, but try
Freida's
up the block. I hear she's taking girls."

T
hat night she dreamt wild vivid dreams. She was a whore at "Martha's Massage." There was a parlor illuminated by bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. She stood in line with other girls while her father walked back and forth. He chose her. She led him down a narrow corridor with open cubicles on either side. She led him into her cubicle. He made love to her without a word. She received no pleasure from it—he averted his face and she averted hers. Afterwards he pulled out a roll of money, peeled off some twenty dollar bills, pressed them into her palm. After he left she stared at the sheet in the doorway, trembling from his exit, swaying back and forth.

She woke up suddenly to find five of her cats sitting on her bed. "Get away, damn you, lousy cats," she said, waving her hands at them, trying to brush them onto the floor. They peered at her, then
lept
off one by one. She lay back and willed herself to sleep. Then she had cat dreams.

Dr. Bowles stared at her with slit cat's eyes. She had whiskers and sharpened teeth. Then Penny was running down a side-street off Times Square pursued by a pack of cats, scampering, meowing, closing in, reaching out with their claws to tear her flesh.

When she woke this time James was sitting on her chest. He was so near she had to squint to see him. His breath was hot upon her face.

She pulled herself back and met his eyes. He knew—she could feel that—knew all about her incest fantasies, knew she was willful, worst of all that she hated him. Dr. Bowles had said animals could sense such things. The psychiatrist had warned her that James would read her mind. Yes, she was sure of it: James knew she despised him. He was sensing her hatred even now as he stretched and arched and hissed.

Suddenly she was terrified. He was like an incubus. "Get off me," she shrieked. "Off! Get off!"

James peered at her, then crouched as if he were going to leap. She was afraid, raised her hand to shield her face. Then she felt a fierce pain. He'd grabbed her wrist. His jaws were open, his teeth sunk deep into her skin. She screamed. He wouldn't let go. She shook her hand, tried to pull her wrist free, but the more she pulled the harder and deeper he bit. She screamed again, thinking she might faint from the pain. Looking around frantically for something to hit him with, she grabbed the alarm clock beside her bed with her free hand and brought it down hard against his skull.

This time it was James' turn to scream. His eyes rolled back in his head. Then his jaws loosened, and she pried his mouth away. She hit him five or six more times, then stumbled to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and let water wash over her gushing wounds. The pain was still bad—the searing had given way to a deeper throbbing hurt. Blood poured from little holes. There was blood all over the sink, on the tile floor, on her sheets and comforter, too. James lay on her bed where she'd hit him, twisted, still. She went to her closet, brought out her broom, poked him with the handle. He didn't move. Her hand was getting numb now. She knew she needed medical care. She dressed, stumbled out to the street, and searched frantically for a cab.

T
hey fixed up her wrist in the emergency room at Lenox Hill. The intern told her she was lucky, that James had had her in a "killer bite" and she could have been badly hurt. The cat could have severed her tendons, cut the veins in her wrist. He gave her a tetanus shot, sprinkled sulfa on the wound, bandaged her up, then asked her for a date. She returned to her apartment, cleaned up as best she could, then threw James' carcass and the bloody sheets and towels into a garbage bag and deposited them on the street.

In the morning it began to snow. She marched to Eighty-sixth, deposited her token in the turnstile, watched the subway screech toward her out of the tunnel, thought how easy it would be to throw herself before it on the tracks.

On the way up to the editorial floor at B&A she thought of staying in the elevator, continuing to the roof, jumping to the street from there. She could imagine the headlines:
UGLY DUCKLING SISTER LEAPS; FOLLOWS SLAIN DEBUTANTE EVEN UNTO DEATH
. But she wouldn't do it, couldn't, knew she didn't have the nerve.

Somehow she got through the day. She tried to do some line-editing but couldn't concentrate. Little noises bothered her, the sounds of traffic outside, typewriters and telephones in adjoining offices, voices muffled by the walls. She went to the women's room, found the corridor ominous. She was startled when she flushed the toilet—the rush of water was like a roar. She spent most of the afternoon staring out her window, watching snowflakes fall, huge and wet. The city seemed merciless. There were men down there who followed her, men she had to evade and trick. There was her father who went to porno cinemas, who kept a shrine to Suzie—a shrine she'd destroyed. There was a cat who'd tried to kill her, a cat she'd bludgeoned to death. Forces were conspiring to squeeze her toward a corner. She tried to resist them but was too weak. The forces were inexorable, the corner dark, full of shadows, perils, lusts. She was backing into it and the pressure was unrelieved.

By the time she got home the snowfall had turned into a storm. There were four inches on the streets. People slipped on the subway stairs.

She knew she had to talk to Dr. Bowles and tell her what she'd done to James. She was a little fearful as she rang the bell, but the psychiatrist greeted her with a smile. "I was making a pot of chocolate. Sit down, you're just in time." While Dr. Bowles puttered in the kitchen, Penny met the eyes of her Persian cats.
They know
, she thought.
They all know what I did
. When Dr. Bowles came back with a pitcher and mugs Penny told her about her dreams.

"Oedipus complex!" The psychiatrist smiled. "That's just nonsense from your fancy schools. It's so easy to pin everything on that, such an easy way to screen the truth." Penny looked down. "I know you didn't come here to pass the time. Something's bothering you. Tell me what it is."

Penny nodded, described her fight with James. She looked up only when she finished, to find Dr. Bowles staring at her, anger and incomprehension on her face.

"You killed him! A defenseless cat! I can't believe it! I can't believe you did!"

Penny tried to explain about the "killer bite," how she'd had no choice, but the more she talked the more furious Dr. Bowles grew until her face was twitching, her head bobbing up and down.

"You brought it on yourself. What an idiot you are! You might have petted him, whispered to him. How
could
you strike him? How
could
you beat upon his head?" The psychiatrist stood up, began to stride the room. She was so furious, so enraged, Penny felt afraid. "No patient of mine has ever harmed a cat. And now you've murdered one.
You
—" She pointed her finger at Penny. "You're a sadist. That's what you are."

"Please!" Penny began to sob. "I was so scared, confused, following my father, and then those dreams. The pain was awful. I thought he'd chew off my wrist." She held up her bandaged hand. "The doctor said—"

"
I'm
your doctor," the psychiatrist snapped. "When all this happened, you should have come to me."

"I know. I'm sorry. Please forgive me, Dr. Bowles. Cats just don't work for me. I can't stand them, I really can't. I've come to tell you that. I hate them. I want to give them up."

The psychiatrist stared at her a moment, nodded curtly then sat down. "Your fear of cats is your real sickness. That's what you've been covering up."

It was then that the notion that Dr. Bowles was mad first flitted through her brain. She rejected the idea at once. Dr. Bowles was her psychiatrist, the person who'd been helping her for weeks. She was trained, accredited, kind. Her patients worshipped her. She rescued little animals, found them homes. She quoted Albert Camus.

"—cats are the key experience in therapy, the way you break the chain of shackles around your soul. Cats release you from your sickness. Cats—"

Cats, cats, cats.
Every other word was
cats
. Whenever she wanted to discuss her troubles, Dr. Bowles always steered the conversation to cats. Suddenly she understood the madness of it all, how she'd been recruited into a cult. Maydays. Burial rituals. An eccentric cosmology with a dominant leader. Cats as a cure for every ailment of man. Dr. Bowles preferred cats to people. She was a crackpot. She was off the wall. Penny knew she had to get away from this woman, break with her right away. As her mind began to focus on that a revelation struck, a terrible, terrifying thought.

"You set me up with James, didn't you?" she blurted. "You knew he was bad. That's why you asked about him all the time."

Dr. Bowles threw back her head, concentrated her eyes. "Don't get hostile with me, Penny. Don't project your hostility on
me
."

"It's true, isn't it? He attacked people before."