by Trixie More
“Listen to me. You have something going on with you. I’m not stupid and hell, even if I am, anybody could tell.” She tilted her head. “You said so yourself. Why don’t you just spit it out? Maybe you’ll feel better.”
“Don’t make this about me,” he growled. “This is about what’s changed with you.”
“Are you insane? This is about whatever it is that makes you the way you are.”
“And how am I, Dorothy?” His lip lifted in a sneer. “What do you think you know about me?”
She threw her hands in the air. “Nothing! I don’t know anything! I know that Allie found something about you on the Internet.”
He moved so fast that a sharp squeal erupted from her as he grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her toward the door. He was stuffing her dress and shoes into the file box, kicking a pair of his sneakers at her and opening the door before she could figure out what was going on. She pressed her palms against the doorjamb. “NO! You don’t get to do this, Ed. You don’t get to leave me again. We have to talk about this …” She was out the door before she finished the sentence.
Spinning around, she stuck her foot into the door before he could close it. “Edward! Ouch! Damn it, Ed. Stop it.” She hitched her hip into the opening and finally, he stopped. For a man who had just pushed her out of his apartment, he certainly looked as surprised to see her there as she felt.
She reached out to touch his face and he winced. “Ed, please. Can’t you tell me?”
He looked over her head. “I’m sure you already know.”
“I don’t.” She shook her head slightly. And there it was. Calm. She was calm. For once, she wasn’t the most broken person in the room and it felt … fine. “Derrick told me not to look it up. He told me I needed to let you tell me in person.” Standing in his doorway, refusing to meet her eyes, Edward looked so lost, it broke her heart. “Edward, I didn’t look it up. I thought Derrick was right.”
She watched his eyes widen, watched as he looked everywhere but at her, watched as something in him shut down. He wasn’t going to talk about it. Not tonight, not ever.
“Call me when you want to talk about it, if that ever happens.” She picked up the file box, stuffed her feet into his ridiculously large shoes and stepped back. “I’ll send your stuff back to you.” And this time, she was the one who left.
Chapter 17
The elevator door shut and he knew she was gone. She might be on the sidewalk, balancing that file box on her hip and waiting for a cab, but he didn’t look. The box must have meant she was fired. When he’d been stuffing her dress into the box, and her shoes, her nude patent leather pumps and no, he wasn’t going there, he’d seen the detritus from her desk. She’d packed up her desk and come straight to his apartment. After, of course, he’d treated her like dirt in the subway. He rubbed his face.
There wasn’t anything to do in the tiny apartment. A bright blue tree frog looked down on him from a photo on his wall. The kitchen sat there, clean, nothing to eat in the fridge, and the TV was silent. When was the last time he’d watched the damn thing? Edward locked his door and sunk down onto the couch, digging around between the cushions until he found the remote. He looked at the long black rectangle in his hands as if it had materialized there on its own. What the hell did he want to watch?
The video. He could drag out the thumb drive and watch the video. It would be the first time he’d watched it in years. The last two times the video had surfaced, he hadn’t bothered.
He paced to the bedroom, almost as if he was acting out somebody else’s plans. There was an insistent portion of his brain that wanted him to go after her. How was it possible that she hadn’t searched him out on the Internet? Dorothy’s roommate knew about him. Some guy named Derrick knew about him and his advice to Dorothy had been to ask him directly, and that is what she’d done.
The behavior was so far outside the realm of the expected that Edward wasn’t sure how to process it. He pulled out his sock drawer and dug the plastic, silver drive out of the back corner. Then he went to the kitchen and poured himself a scotch and water. With ice. He walked back to the living room and cast the video from his computer to his flat screen TV. He paused the video while all it showed was a blue sky and the remains of what had obviously been a long and drunken party around a sparkling in-ground pool.
Dorothy had asked him to tell her. To explain not only that he was damaged, but how he came to be that way. She wanted him to tell her about this … this abomination. She had no idea what she was asking him for. She suspected something, maybe a woman who had broken his heart, maybe some betrayal or other banal trauma. She sure as fuck didn’t expect this shit.
The leather couch made a soft sigh as he plunked down. On the screen, the blue of the sky seemed so out of place. It should have been stormy and forbidding, not clear blue.
GHB had been in the beer he’d drank. He had no real memories of anything on the video. He didn’t remember the sex or any of it. Edward had suspected, hell, he’d known, when he’d woke up on the grass with no pants on and his ass on fire. He’d known, but he couldn’t recall it. As long as it had stayed like that, he’d been able to make up other stories about what might have been. It had been hell, but it had been so much better than knowing.
Edward downed another dram of Scotch and then went back to the kitchen, tore open all the cabinets looking for some crackers or anything he could delay with. Dorothy had left. He was alone again, and already he knew there was no going back to the way his life had been just a week ago. He’d experienced what he’d been missing and he didn’t want to give it up. A box of wheat crackers and a jar of peanut butter were lurking in a cupboard behind a can of beans and three cans of chickpeas he’d bought when he thought he could save money making hummus himself. Edward grabbed a bottle of water and headed back. Looked at the spread laid out on the trunk and just poured more scotch. He wasn’t going to eat while he watched this shit.
He sighed and hit play.
The camera was wavering and the indistinct voices of two men could be heard. Round, gray gravel swung up in the viewer as the person holding the camera let his hand fall to his side. Worn and scraped boat shoes moved forward into site and then back out of view, showing the hairy calf, ankle and foot of someone on the cameraman’s left. There. There it was. Edward hit pause.
On the huge flat screen was a view of a man’s calf. Edward knew it would show up only twice more on this video. He imagined the man’s hand had swung behind him, allowing the camera to pick up the image of the back and the right side of the guy’s calf. Deeply tan, strong, and sprinkled with sparse pale hair and decorated with a tattoo.
“Son of a bitch,” he cursed. Frustration surged through him, its speed and intensity shocking. His back, shoulders and chest were tense, and the desire to hit something was irresistible. He pounded his fist on the trunk before him and the cracker box bounced onto the floor. He kicked out at the yellow box with his foot before he even thought about it. How could he be so affected by the sight of that tattoo after all this time? It wasn’t as if he’d forgotten it. He could sketch the design in his sleep, knew exactly how often it appeared and which appearance gave the best view of it. Sharp edges and fluid curves wrapped from just above the Achilles over to the side of the leg in a twisting tribal S. The color was standard tattoo blue-black and even then, it had been faded and stretched, as if the design had been inked when the calf had belonged to a younger, scrawnier man. Ed paced over to the screen and studied the leg frozen there, but he saw nothing new. He wasn’t surprised. Repeated searches through the police database had yielded nothing as well. Frustrated, he returned to the couch, downed another shot, and hit play. He assumed the position in which he watched the video, arms folded across his chest, back straight. It wouldn’t take long; the video was eight minutes and forty-two seconds.
The camera panned up, showing the concrete decking around the pool, the glistening blue pool, the tables and chairs, finally aligning correctly w
ith the horizon so that the scene of a party, almost over, was spread before the viewer. On one chair, a man lay sleeping, face down, one arm thrown over the edge of the chaise, the back of the hand gracefully resting on the concrete. Red, shiny, plastic cups littered the ground and the tables. Umbrellas stood at odd angles, sprouting from the patio tables. In the distance, the movement of a man, bending over a dull aluminum keg caught the attention of the camera and the focus adjusted unsteadily, clarifying the features of the subject.
Of course it was Edward. Of course there was no way to stop his younger self from serving himself that beer.
His younger, better self, turned away from the keg and walked back along the far side of the pool, toward the house. He set the plastic cup on a table, an action he’d seen himself do a hundred times, but for the life of him, couldn’t remember. Then he moved to the sliding glass doors of the main house. It was a two-story home with the gables and dormers. The cedar shakes painted a faded sage spoke of friendly beachside family gatherings. If it had been a cold concrete and glass structure, maybe he wouldn’t have felt so relaxed that day. Hardly. He’d done this for a living, cared for other people’s homes and property. Now, he made his living protecting things nobody owned.
His younger self went to the back doors, which stood ajar, and moved inside. He knew that he would have checked around inside quickly, called out to confirm that everyone was out of the house before closing the doors up. The camera was more interested in what was happening on the patio. In the video, the face of the person who followed him to the patio was cut off but it was easy to see him open a paper packet over the red cup and then slosh the contents around. The perpetrator didn’t leave or even pretend not to be manipulating the beer, rather he picked up the cup and walked over to the doors, handing the cup to Edward as he emerged from the cool darkness.
The video was carefully cropped to show no faces other than Ed’s, and all the rest of the drama, the next six minutes, was a viewing of three headless, faceless men. Tattoo leg, heavy sleeper and the camera man was how Ed had named them. There was an obvious splice at this point; it must have taken a while for the drug to do its work. By the time the video picked up, Ed was seated in a plastic lawn chair, speaking animatedly to someone off camera, the red cup dangling precariously from his hand. Beer sloshed from the cup and dribbled across his knee and he startled, glancing down and getting the cup upright, leaning forward, setting it on a table and then wiping at the beer. He stood up and moved to the pool, crouched down and leaned forward scooping some water from the pool out and dashing it over his leg. Feet moved behind him, hands were placed on his shoulders, pressing him down. He lost his balance and came to a kneeling position. The camera closed in. He was smiling, a question on his face and he looked up. Before him, the engorged tip of a penis appeared and the camera pulled back to show a hand, smoothing and stroking it semi-erect. The smile on Ed’s face faded. He frowned, his confusion clear. There was no sound, but he’d obviously said put that thing away.
On the screen, his younger self turned his head, squeezing his eyes shut, mouth turned down in a grimace of disgust. The camera moved in. On his shoulders, the hands holding him gripped his head to keep him from moving further. The round, smooth head of the penis caressed his cheek, the owner’s hand moving the tip across Ed’s face, from Ed’s eye down to the corner of his mouth and back. Ed shook his head and the movement seemed to help the hands holding his face to turn him toward the penis. The cock continued pressing against his lips, nudging forward.
Something must have been said, because Ed’s eyes opened in surprise, looking up. He was jerked higher on his knees and he opened his mouth. The penis slid inside easily. And out. And in.
Edward watched himself, kneeling before another man, held under the arms by a man’s hands and he still couldn’t process it. Why hadn’t he bit the guy? He wanted that young version of himself to fight, God damn it. Instead that Edward had a strange look, an almost wistful half smile. Edward looked away from the screen, didn’t want to see that expression on his own face, didn’t want to see his rapist spray the thin, whey colored droplets of sperm on his face while the hands behind him stroked his head like he was a dog.
Nausea roared up his throat and he bolted down the hall to the bathroom. He heaved until his stomach was empty. In the living room, he could hear that the video had finished. He knelt on the tile before the toilet, twelve years later and still on his knees.
The lid of the toilet felt cool against his hands. Reaching up, he flushed and gave himself another minute before rising, brushing his teeth and gargling. The desire to brush again was very strong. Edward looked at himself in the mirror. He was a man ruled by the actions of others. Who knew if those men were even still alive, but here he was, hiding in Manhattan, launching preemptive strikes against the first woman he’d … He didn’t finish the thought. He’d be damned if he brushed his teeth again. His damn mouth was clean. He returned to the living room to clean out the rest of his conscience.
For the first time since Dorothy had denied their relationship, he felt like himself. He had an objective and he was a man who met his objectives.
He walked briskly to where the cracker box lay beneath his desk. He picked it up, grabbed the scotch and put them both away.
Next up, finish what he’d started. He replayed the section of the video he’d missed. He sat stonily on the couch and watched as they tossed him a pair of swim trunks to wipe his face with. Droplets of water ran from the ends of his hair and dropped onto his shoulders as he coughed and cleaned himself. Edward leaned forward. His younger self had bruises around his neck. Ed sat back. He couldn’t remember how they had happened. He remained unblinking as they led him to a table, two pairs of hands alternately running their hands over his body and pushing against his shoulders until he was bent over, face lying on the dirty plastic table. There were raw scrapes running up the sides of his spread legs. Behind him, the immaculately pruned hedges made a paradise of the back yard, and in the distance, a stretch of ocean was visible below the horizon.
On the screen, he was naked. Hands stroked him to an erection. Watching, he felt his face burn, but he didn’t look away. The penetration was fast and brutal. On the screen, he screamed. Here in his apartment, years later, sweat broke out on his face.
When it was over, he rewound it. And watched again.
You can rent a car in Manhattan carrying a file box and wearing someone else’s clothes. Good to know. Dorothy plunked the file box into the trunk of the economy sized car and wedged her cell phone into a drink holder so she could see the map directions to her parents’ home. She knew how to get there, but this afternoon, she just wanted the little voice to tell her when her exit was coming. Ed’s shoes were a hazard to drive in, so she tossed them onto the passenger seat. At the first toll booth, she had to shove them back on, trot around to the trunk and get her purse, since the rental car didn’t have an E-Z pass. After that, she drove just like the real New Yorker she was. That is to say, as if she never drove.
With the windows rolled down a bit and the noise of the highway, there was hardly any reason to think. No reason to think at all. Dorothy turned up the heat and rolled the window down farther. It wasn’t a very green thing to do, but then again, neither were patent leather pumps or expensive coffee. Her plastic Jesus was a sin too, she supposed. She snorted at the thought.
Somewhere behind Manhattan, the sun descended toward the horizon. Her parents’ home was well lit by the time she got there. More bad mojo for the ol’ earth. Twelve rooms and a boat house on Long Island, all heated, all cooled, all lit. All for the two people inside, moving on in their lives, moving farther away from Dorothy, in a sense. She slammed the car door. Damn, she felt maudlin tonight.
At the door, she hesitated. What if they were, well, anything … or something … but unclothed? These were her parents and yet, this wasn’t her home anymore. She knocked and cracked the door open an inch or so and called out.
“Mo
m? Dad?”
There was movement and then her mom appeared, pulling the door open.
“Dorothy!” She tugged Dorothy gently inside. The entryway was cozy, not grand, as in some of the other homes around here. There was no soaring space, just a doorway to the living room, the stairs leading up to the second floor and the hallway to the kitchen. A small lamp on a narrow table, glowed warmly, illuminating the dark teal of the walls, the slate stone floor. “Are you all right?” Helen looked outside into the driveway. “Whose car is that?”
“It’s mine, Mom.” Something smelled wonderful, like soup.
“You bought a car?” Helen shut the door, hooking her hair behind one ear. She had on a pair of neatly pressed white cotton capris and a blue short-sleeve blouse. The fine chain and golden cross she wore, gleamed at the base of her throat. Despite the late hour, she could have walked out the door and onto a golf course.
“It’s a rental.” Dorothy hugged herself and moved down the long hallway, past the framed photos of her, her parents, their friends. She ended up in the kitchen, of course. It was warm, the smell of thyme and chicken stronger now. On the stove, a polished soup pot reflected the overhead light. The dark cooktop was spotless, any evidence of food preparation already whisked away by Helen.
“Mom? I got fired today.” The words just popped out. Behind her, her mom made a noise of surprise.
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.” Helen gave Dorothy a warm hug but Dorothy didn’t hug her back. She wondered at her own stiffness.
“Mom?” A butterfly or two took flight inside Dorothy.
“Hmm?” Helen walked over to a small TV on the counter and shut it off.
“How much is in my trust fund?” Dorothy watched the vertical line appear between her mother’s light eyebrows as Helen tipped her head slightly, her mouth turning down even as her eyes remained curious and warm.