The Pillow Friend (36 page)

She wept at her own helplessness. “What am I going to do?” she demanded.

Her lover said nothing.

She stared at his naked body, as familiar now as her own and yet mysteriously still desirable. Unable to help herself, wallowing in her own helpless, mindless lust, she gave him a little push so he was flat on his back, and mounted him. He was always ready for her, always erect, he never came, he never spoke, he never imposed his own desires—the only desires he had were hers. She stared down at his blank sleeping face and felt hate rise in her, hot as passion. “What am I going to do, damn you?”

He still said nothing. She squeezed his cock inside her and clenched fists that wanted to squeeze his neck. “Look at me!”

His eyelids fluttered and, for the first time, rose. The eyes that looked up at her out of her husband's face were not blue. They were muddy gray flecked with hazel; not his eyes but her own.

She had a moment of absolute terror. She couldn't move; she was joined to him irrevocably, he was a part of herself she could never escape. And then she accepted it. The fear passed. And she was still hungry.

“I'm starving,” she whined. “I need to eat. If I don't eat, I'll die.”

In answer, he lifted his arm toward her face. She looked at it: solid, meaty. He raised it a little more and she felt it brush her lips. She opened her lips, touched his flesh, as so often before, with her tongue. Then, when he did not draw it away, she let him feel her teeth. When he still did not move, she bit him. That first, tentative, lover's bite did nothing, so she bit him again, and this time tore away a chunk of his flesh in her jaws.

There was no blood. His flesh was dry and chewy, the texture that of a dumpling or a half-cooked roll, and it tasted a little like salty bread.

She swallowed the first mouthful and was instantly ravenous for more. She looked at him, still offering her his arm, and saw herself looking back. She flinched at that, but then saw it as validation of what she was about to do. If he was her, then he was hers, to do with as she wanted. Obviously he was feeling no pain. More than that: he was enjoying it. He was smiling slightly, she recognized the voluptuous pleasure relaxing his features, and she could feel him still erect inside her.

She leaned down and took a large, deliberate bite out of his shoulder. It was delicious. It tasted like nothing she knew, and yet she had the sense that she had always been longing for it. Even before she'd swallowed her mouth was watering for more. The more she ate of him the more the craving grew. As she consumed his arms and chest she was soon no longer starving, but as her actual need decreased her appetite became even stronger. She wanted to eat every bit of him.

Eating his head was the strangest, scariest, most difficult part. She felt like a monster: that she wanted to do what she was doing was the hardest to accept, as hard as seeing her own eyes in Gray's familiar face staring knowingly back at her. She closed her eyes and growled as she tore his ear off.

And then he was gone from the waist up. But she could still feel his penis inside her. Suddenly she couldn't bear it any longer; the situation was too horrible. For a while she'd been able to imagine they were sharing in her cannibalistic feasting, as if eating was just another type of sex. But not now that his head was gone, and he had no face. She felt neither sexy nor hungry. She was beginning to feel afraid. She moved to disengage and found she could not; his penis seemed to be stuck inside her. Horrible stories heard in adolescence, images she'd believed long forgotten, flared in her brain. Although she was in no pain a panicky fear made her jerk and fight, and in a moment she was free, crouching beside the legs and lower torso. Before she could even begin an approach to calm she had seen that the torso had testicles but no penis. It had broken off inside her.

She opened her mouth, feeling a scream building, and then she forced her head down to his weirdly empty groin and made herself eat. She had to finish what she had begun; there was no other way. It made no difference that she no longer wanted him: he was hers, and she had to take him all inside.

Her jaws ached from chewing and her throat from swallowing. She was so full she could not imagine containing any more, but she knew she must. The taste of his flesh, once so compelling, now was sickening. Mouthful after mouthful she forced down, hardly chewing, holding her breath sometimes, keeping her mind a blank. If she thought about what she was doing, what she had done, she would be sick, and it was too soon for that. If she was sick, here and now, she'd only have to eat him all over again. She didn't question her knowledge; there were rules which had to be obeyed.

She made herself keep eating until there was nothing left to eat, and then she fell asleep.

She had no idea when she woke what time it was or what day. She felt bloated and unhappy, unrested, but she made herself get up. Getting to her feet she had the faintly uncomfortable sensation of wearing a tampon which had shifted from its usual position and needed to be removed, but when she checked with her finger there was nothing there.

Although she felt an urgency to get out of the house, she nevertheless took a shower—cold, of course. It was easier to do that than spend the rest of the day worrying what she smelled like, or what strange substances might have spotted her skin. Then she dressed quickly in clean clothes, stuffed everything else back into her suitcase, and left.

Two hours later she was entering Houston in rush hour. Creeping along the jammed freeway, she realized she would have to make a decision soon, or the prevailing currents of traffic would carry her off to Sugarland or worse. She'd had no destination in mind beyond Houston. She could go stay with her sister, as she had done before the funeral, but she didn't want to. She tried to remember which of her high school friends were still around.

The exit sign for West University Place caught her eye and she moved, managing, through a combination of luck and determination, to get into the exit lane before it was too late. She made her way to the village shopping center where long ago she'd hung out with Roxanne. As she'd remembered, there was a pay phone on the corner by the Mexican restaurant. She thought about calling Leslie's mother, who had been so kind at the funeral.

But as soon as she picked up the phone she knew she had to call Gray first. Making arrangements for where to spend the night was not as urgent as her need to speak to him, to hear his voice. She needed to be reminded of their life together, to be pulled back into the real world. All at once, in the familiar, hot, humid Houston evening, she missed the cool, damp little house in Harrow quite desperately. The sound of the abrupt purring ring of their telephone in her ear—so different from the American ringing tone that the first time she'd heard it she'd thought it was a busy signal and hung up—made her stomach tense with anticipation. In a moment she would hear his voice.

But the phone went on ringing, unanswered, until the operator said, “I'm sorry, there's no reply.”

“Thank you. I'll try again later.” But it was already later—it would be after midnight there. He should have been in bed. Maybe he was in the bathroom? She marched up and down the block until she'd convinced herself of this, then went back to the phone to try again.

Still no reply, although she asked the operator to let it ring a little longer “in case he's asleep.” But she knew perfectly well that Gray could never sleep through the ringing of a telephone. If he wasn't answering the phone he must be out.

“Um, Agnes?”

The soft, familiar voice caught at her heart. She turned around, astonished.

Alex Hill smiled at her. “I thought it was you. I saw you go past the window when I was in the restaurant, and then when I came out, you were on the phone. It's really nice to see you. Are you going to be in town long? Oh—” He stopped smiling as he remembered. “I heard about your mother. I'm really sorry.”

She started to say thank you and then stopped. Surely that wasn't right. What did you say when someone offered commiserations? How did you accept? She hadn't figured it out at the funeral and it was even harder to know what to say now. But she had to say something, if only that it was nice to see him, too. He was still waiting for her response. She opened her mouth. “I,” she said helplessly. “It's . . .” She began to cry.

He put his arms around her and held her. He said nothing at all, just let her cry. Occasionally he patted her on the back.

“I'm sorry,” she said when at last she was able to stop. She pulled away from him although what she wanted most was to go on resting against his chest, feeling protected.

“Don't apologize. You have a good reason for crying. I wish—are you here by yourself? Were you going somewhere?”

“I was just trying to call my husband. There's no answer; I want to try again.”

“Come home with me. You can call him from there.”

“It's long distance.”

“I know. I'll send you a bill. We don't take as big a rake-off as some hotels. . . . Where are you staying?”

“I don't know. I just got back—I need to call somebody, find a place to stay.”

“Look no further. Where's your car? You can leave it there. Get your things. I'll bring you back in the morning, drop you off on my way to work. My office is just up the street.”

She made no protest because this was just what she wanted. It was such a relief to be taken care of, to have decisions made for her, and it was all the better that the white knight of her fantasies should be the first boy she'd ever loved.

Sitting beside him in his car, being driven home, she felt entirely comfortable for what seemed the first time in years. She paid no attention to where they were going. She listened to the tapes he played: Bonnie Raitt, Pat Benatar. She wished the journey could last forever.

His house was a new, narrow town house that looked like all its neighbors, sand-colored brick and pale wood. Inside there was an impression of bare, sparse modernity: a large, open-plan space with white walls and minimal furniture of chrome, glass and black leather. Black-and-white photographs adorned the walls. She saw a stack of
Vogue
magazines on the chrome-and-glass table, but no books. It seemed a little bleak to her, and impressively clean.

“Nice place,” she said.

“It's all right. Do you want something to drink? Have you eaten? There's stuff to eat.”

“I could eat something.” She followed him into the kitchen, a narrow, beige and white area separated from the dining area by a long counter.

“I still can't cook—I can only offer you a sandwich, or something from Lean Cuisine.” He gestured at the freezer.

“A sandwich would be fine.”

“Peanut butter and jelly?”

“Great. Do you know what jelly means in England?”

He shook his head, getting out the bread.

“Jell-O.”

“So the idea of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich . . .”

“Exactly.” She sighed happily, crossed her arms and leaned on the counter, watching him as he moved. He had put on weight since college and the buttons of his blue shirt strained slightly across his stomach. There was the softness she had felt when she had rested in his arms, and it was something he probably looked at and pinched with dismay after every shower, promising himself to do something about it. Lean cuisine, she thought, and remembered how he had liked to eat, how they had all liked to eat, and drink, during their last semester together in Austin. Remembering how they had eventually ended up in bed together she wondered why they hadn't done so sooner, or why that once had not developed into the affair she had always wanted. They'd had other involvements, their lives had progressed in different ways. She wished it otherwise. She could almost believe it was, at that moment in his kitchen, the two of them bound in wordless intimacy as she watched him make her sandwich. It was wonderful to watch; he took such care. First he buttered both slices of bread, then spread Skippy peanut butter on one and Welch's grape jelly on the other. After he pasted the bread together, he cut the crusts off before cutting the sandwich in half slant-wise. It was exactly the way she'd liked it as a child, and she hadn't had a peanut butter sandwich made for her with such care and delicate attention to detail since then, when her mother had made them for her. He invited her to sit at the dining table and served it to her just as her mother would have done, on a small plate, with a glass of milk.

“This is wonderful,” she said after swallowing the first bite. “This is great. Delicious.”

“Oh, hey, come on. It's a peanut butter sandwich!”

“But beautifully prepared. Perfectly made. Really, I haven't had such a perfect peanut butter sandwich since I was a kid.”

He shook his head. “Well, I guess I can keep you happy as long as your needs don't get any more complicated.”

His eyes sparkled down at her and she smiled back. “Oh, my needs are very simple.”

He turned away from her, toward the fridge. “I think I'll have a beer. Want to join me?”

She looked at her untouched glass of milk. “Mmmm, maybe later. This really calls for milk, not beer. I don't want to spoil the peanut butter experience.”

“Certainly not! You don't want to spoil that dinner it took me so long to make. Maybe when Mon gets home. She should be back in half an hour or so. She never wants to eat in the evenings, but she sometimes likes a drink.”