She was a good person. She didn’t think she deceived herself in believing so. Morality as touted in public was always so black and white. But in the privacy of the lone soul, gray shaded between them in infinite gradation. She needed her freedom from Marcus or she would die in spirit. It was that simple. No one looking in upon her life might support that belief. But from the inside, from her secure and certain vantage point, its truth was undeniable.
He’d said he loved her, he’d opened a glimmer of what might have been. It touched her heart. But his words had come too late. Katt wasn’t about to gamble on last-minute conversions, not when the goal she had resolved upon-with trepidation at first, then more decisively-lay so near at hand. Not after the torment she’d endured, nor after what she’d put Marcus and Conner through. Sounded selfish, the torment she had endured. She flashed upon a lawyer pacing before a jury, calling out her arrogance. But who rlly, outside of the entrenched arrogance of the law itself, had the right to judge her suffering? Or its severity? Or to seek to diminish it or her, simply because she was killing an innocent man, heartlessly, ruthlessly?
Her throat felt hard. Swallowing around a golf ball, she turned away from the mirror, dried her hands, and slid back the closet door. Jeans, a tank top, a flannel shirt. Katt whipped them off their hangers. Dresser drawer then. Stuck. Hard knob-yank, Katt kept it from spilling when it gave. Panties, bra, out into the clutch of her hand. She had to dress and be out of there before the water juddered to a halt, before Marcus’s towel-wrapped figure emerged to once more engage her in unbearable conversation.
A race that was no race. She knew it in her mind but that didn’t lessen her discomfort. She struggled with her clothing at every turn. But in the end, Katt triumphed, a Pyrrhic victory, and gripped the doorknob even as the rush of hot water continued its muffled, full-on hurtle.
4
HARD YOKE, HEAVY BURDEN
Sherry had heard about Marcus’s collapse, of course; a rumor not having far to travel on campus and corroboration ever close behind. Given the gravity of the reports she’d overheard, it surprised her to receive his phone call less than a week after he’d been stricken. Small talk at first in newly enfeebled tones, then quickly to brass tacks-how he felt, his prognosis, and an invitation to drop by, meet his wife and child, say goodbye.
Now here she was at their front door, beautiful house on a rich street. A dare to herself mostly. Add a morbid curiosity into the mix and her presence, still setting her atingle with uncertainty, made some sort of sense.
Footsteps. The door eased back. And there stood the woman she’d seduced two weeks before! Katt seemed flooded with emotions but surprise was not among them. “Come in,” she said. “Marcus is upstairs.”
Absurd! Katt didn’t belong here!
“But you’re…” The words wouldn’t come.
“Yes. I’m his wife.”
Sherry faltered over the doorstep, following. Things in the hallway went by in a haze and she could hardly feel the steps pass beneath her feet as they rose. Rage seized her first, rage at being tricked. But the house seemed so powerfully sad around Katt’s fullness of feeling, that the emotion that settled upon Sherry-and this surprised her- was shame. Here she was, flowers in hand, rising to stare lightly at a dying man, contemplating death. This man had cheated with her; and his wife, who had deceived them both but showed no animosity, now led her to his side. Through an armor of numbness, shame pierced and stuck.
He looked terrible. The rich swarthiness of his face now lay drained and gray, its skin wrinkled like a parched gully. Three pillows angled his head, but except for that elevation, he looked for all his wanness as if he might be stretched upon a bier already. His eyes, erradc in their attempts to focus, shone dull and unsettling.
“Hello, Sherry.” The voice was surprisingly loud and steady, not what she’d expected after his phone call.
“Hi, Marcus,” she said. “I brought you these.” Katt lifted the bouquet from her, as though relieving her of a final secret, and set them on the nightstand. It struck Sherry odd that Katt kept her distance from the bed.
He thanked her for the carnations, then, “Do you have any problems if I… I mean, I want to…" From his tone, he clearly wanted to confess their affair.
She nodded. What difference could it make? His wife already knew, may well have known from the outset of their BBS conversations.
His head shifted a fraction. “I’m sorry, Katt. I’ve had other women in my life. Behind your back.”
“Yes,” said Katt, “and Sherry was among them, the one that brought us to Colorado. I’ve known for some time but it all seems pretty inconsequential to me now.”
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
“Forgive me?” asked Marcus.
Sherry’s plaintive “I’m sorry” overlapped, soft, almost gasped.
“Nothing to forgive.” Katt’s face made it impossible to gauge the truth of her words, it was so full of warring emotions. “You’re dying, Marcus. I want-"
She stopped.
Her eyes glistened.
“I want,” she said, “to put the past behind us.” Sherry felt an impulse to hug her, but she was frozen to her spot of rug, there in a hush of sunlight. Half her mind told her to escape to the safe solitude of her condo. The other half, however, found a haven here, in the stream of emotions that flowed from these two. It opened her up. It made her feel penitent, forgiven, ready to grapple with buried feeling, to conquer it and begin anew.
***
Marcus minimized all movement when other people were about. By himself, he’d raise an arm, watch it strobe by in marionette-like jerkiness. His thoughts, as his voice, held steady. But he could feel the disease sculpting his brain-and he could sense control slipping away, silently enraged by it, whenever he moved or tried to walk. Quick beyond all documented speed the Huntington’s had befallen him. His doctors had been amazed. But Katt had insisted his care be under her control, at home. They’d get their chance, when he was dead, to poke and probe, to pore over the secrets of his brain and body.
Peached light scoured across his mate and his lover. They were gorgeous, both of them, and though his cock lay inert beneath the covers, lust flared plumheaded and hard in his mind, then subsided. But it’d be back. Twice now he’d spewed uncontrollable desire over Katt, listening in horror as his mouth spilled unbridled nastiness into her, his limbs writhing with need.
“You shame me with your goodness,” he told Katt, and he could feel his guilt, as batted with cotton haze as it was, dissipate before her generosity.
Her agitation increased. “It all seems so petty now and it’s pointless to waste time with blaming. Look, let me go put these in water.” She tried for the flowers but her hands shook and she needed a second grab. Hot animal lust tickled him at the sight of her drawing near, at her buttock-rolling departure across the room.
The door clicked shut.
Just him and Sherry here now.
It bubbled up out of him, urgent need, a quick crazy seizure of desire. He issued the sweet sex animal before him a command, low, raw, guttural.
“What?” Sherry’s strong eyes, which had fawned soft since she’d entered the room, flicked hard and sharp.
“You heard me.” His words spewed forth, not loud so much as heavy with heat and need. “Take me in your mouth and suck me. I want to feel your pussy, I want to see it and taste it and plug it up.” Even as the sounds spilled from him, they began to warp and weaken.
“C’mon, Marcus. Are you crazy?” Sherry looked like a mix of turned on and cornered.
His longings had issued like steam and now the valve closed again. “Oh jeez, Sherry, I’m sorry. But I’m okay now. The thoughts come and go, all kinds of crazy things all the time, and sometimes I can stop them and sometimes I can’t.”
“I understand.” She didn’t. The light played wildly over her straight red hair, down across the welling up of her perfect sweatered breasts, the jut of them as he tore at her blou
se and bra, freeing the stiff-nippled lovelies to suck and lick and pull upon. She stood planted on the carpet, unmoved. But th& wowing light seemed to draw her toward him-that tasty mouth, those lickable thighs.
“It’s just that… your fuck-lovely body is so close, I can smell you from here, I want it, I need it, I want to shove my cock into you.” He raised a hand and it rippled like cubism through the air. Katt came in. “And Katt too, I can smell her too. I want you both together, here right now, riding me, feeding my face, giving me one last chance to taste your juices.”
It was shooting out of him like sperm riding impulse unstoppable.
Through the room’s angled air, he cried.
His tears, his lust, kept flowing, kept swelling and surging as though they’d never stop.
“What’s going on?” he heard Katt say. The blue vase hung in her hands like a stretched dick and balls.
“You tell me," Sherry said. But how could it be her if she was riding him? And yet there she was in the same place as when she’d come in.
“-yes, ride me, don’t leave me, I miss you, I can’t live without you, I love you, fuck me, fuck me, don’t let me do it alone-” on and on it went, his hips bucking hot and wild beneath the covers.
And then it let up. Blew over. Except for the fact that ceiling plaster slabbed above him, Marcus felt as if he were kneeling beside a toilet, a frenzy of vomiting at last subsiding.
“I’m sorry,” he said, gasping, bathed in cold sweat. Again and again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And the lovers he’d once loved stood there, watching him. He understood how poorly he’d treated Katt, without ever really meaning to. How much of Sherry he’d missed by concentrating-how many others had done the same-on her body alone. And he thought of Conner, holed away in the house, terrified, as he surely must be, at the prospect of his life and health slipping at any time so swiftly down the rathole of their shared illness.
Weeping seized him. The women were saying something but he couldn’t hear them through his tears and apologies and his thoughts of Conner. Didn’t matter a fucking damn anyway. He had days before he died, either of brain rot, or more likely from catching something he couldn’t resist in his weakened state. The light-scour had rhythmed into his head, caressing, caressing, governing his desiccation as surely as a potter lorded it over clay. He wanted the end to be swift but he was greedy for life too. His sobs caught at his throat, felt like a tape loop, the women in some bizarre repeated loop of their own, toward him, away from him, lights flickering over their bodies and cutting their words into long thin strips of gibberish.
***
I ought to go to him, she thought. I ought to sit by him on the bed and hold his hand and stroke his brow until he stops crying. That’s what a wife ought to do. Sherry, remembering this moment, will tell someone.
Or she’ll ask me why I didn’t.
And I’ll break down.
“It’s all right, Marcus,” Sherry said.
“He gets like this,” Katt told her. “Try to be calm, Marcus. There’s nothing to apologize for.” So bizarre it was to see the two of them together and to hear the insane talk fly from him, the sex talk, directed yes at Katt, but its scatter tying him and the redhead together, suggesting in a twisted way their past trysts. Katt’d never realized how territorial she was. She wanted the disease to spring from the bed, like Marcus’s words, to leap forth and cover Sherry, overwhelm her unease with terminal jitters.
She wanted it to claim them both.
And she could make it happen. Assuming Sherry wanted anything more to do with her, she could close in on her, a hand probing, caressing, revisiting that cervix, honing in on the hints of cancer she’d found, setting it loose.
No! One was enough. Katt felt animosity toward her, yes. But in the grand scheme of things, she was innocent, strange as that sounded-caught between the imperfect mesh of the broken gears of a failed marriage. She stifled the urge to grin through her pain. She was no murderer. This one killing felt right, its end in sight-relief, freedom, and no sin at all. But Sherry was a different matter, and acting out of jealousy would have made Katt a criminal.
“I… I think I’m okay now.” Marcus seemed to be cried out. “I just wanted… I wanted to say goodbye to you. I’ve made some mistakes. It wasn’t a mistake to know you, Sherry. Not at all. But it was wrong to break my promise to Katt. I hurt my… my wife. I’m sorrier about that than I know how to say. It’s been a privilege to know you and to love you; I wish it could have been under different circumstances. You have a good life, now, you hear? Full, rich, and blessed in every way.”
Katt watched Sherry squirm under this, unable to look her way. “Thanks, Marcus,” Sherry said. “You were a good friend. You deserve better than this.”
“Maybe we should be going,” Katt said, unwrapping the flowers and placing them in the vase. Its flared base was cold with new tap water.
Sherry seemed relieved. “Yes,” she said.
Katt pulled open the door.
Sherry paused there. “Goodbye, Marcus,” she said.
“Goodbye,” he said, and Katt eased the door shut after her sobered guest.
The hallway felt cooler, less intense, than the room.
They started for the stairs but Sherry stopped. “I’m sorry, Katt.” It felt genuine coming from her, a softness there Katt had never seen before. Usually so tightly clad in cool armor as Sherry was, this warm directness made her more beautiful by far than her fashion-magazine looks ever could.
“I understand,” Katt said. “And I forgive you.”
Then Conner’s bedroom door, two doors down, flew open and he came out. He stopped when he saw the two women. A look passed over his face, a wry twist of the neck. She’d seen this before. On TV perhaps? A gawky teenage gesture over a laugh-track? It was maddeningly vague. There began in her belly some new feeling, a spot, then a swirl, as he stood there looking worn and sad and in need of love. And then the feeling swept up and seized her and she knew, the sure knowing that she wanted to deny, and she had to break away in sudden panic and make for the hall bathroom.
***
Conner watched his mom go. All day he’d felt numb, a witness as the disease filled his house. The pretty lady, someone he’d not seen before, had her eyes on him.
“Hi,” he said.
“You’re Conner,” she said. “I’m Sherry.” Then as if remembering, she raised her hand, shook his. “I’m friends with your mom and dad. On the CSU faculty.”
“You want some food?”
“No. Well maybe. I don’t know.” He could tell that she felt out of place. Like him.
“C’mon then.” He thundered down the stairs, pounding at them like his mother yelled at him for. She’d be okay. She’d cry in there or whatever. She’d given him some more vacant hugs just about every time she saw him. Gripped so tight around him, he felt like one of those squeeze dolls, the kind whose pink head puffs up like a lightbulb.
He waited at the landing for this Sherry person, legs real pretty in tights where they stuck out of her skirt.
“Kitchen’s this way,” he said, bounding down the turn of three steps and heading along the thin hallway. Didn’t wait for her to catch up. He liked that she followed him. That’s how his girlfriend would be if he ever had one, but he probably never would. “Over there’s the sink, a window or two, dishwasher, cookbooks, we got it all.” He essayed a smile, and from her look it seemed she caught it but had no idea how to handle it.
He flung the pantry door back, catching it with his other hand before it gouged the wall. A crumpled bag of Oreos. Conner fingered in past the wrapping and pulled out a stack of six or seven.
“Your pleasure,” he said.
“What?”
“Do you want some?”
She said no and he gestured to the pantry so she’d be sure to take what she liked.
“I’ll be down here,” into the great room and down the carpeted stairs. But she was right behind him, nothing in her hands, no food, no
drink. She couldn’t eat any of his Oreos. Not even if she begged. He led her through a door into the unfinished basement, flicking a lightswitch as he went.
“Nice place you have here.”
“It’s my hovel,” he said, assuming the folding chair. “You can hear everything going on, but at a remove. Makes you feel like royalty. King of the underworld.”
There was a footrest, the same silver tubing and pale cloth that made the chair. She claimed it, sat with those pretty legs together and her knuckles gripping the canvas. She had shiny red hair, almost like thin wire filament, at her brow and falling splash upon her shoulders. “You seem to be taking this pretty well,” she said.
He shrugged. He took an Oreo from the stack but held it at eye level like a thick coin, no hurry. “What my dad has? I’ve got it too. Did they tell you?”
“I know it’s inherited. And that there’s a chance it won’t happen to you, a good chance.” She was lying. That last second-thought of a phrase. Grownups always added a phrase like that and hoped you were dumb enough not to see the lies spilling out of it.
“So, Sherry.” He popped an Oreo in whole and munched it, watching her. When his mouth was mostly free, he went on. “How long do you think you’re going to live?”
“How long?” She wasn’t prepared, like all the others he could think of. She hadn’t given it a thought.
“Yes, how long?”
“I don’t know. Until I’m ninety or a hundred. Maybe more, if I’m lucky.”
“And how old are you now?”
He’d hit a cliche. She was grinning. People liked a cliche, cuz it took them onto familiar ground for a little while. “Now I don’t think that’s any… Then she saw his face and dropped the game. “I’m thirty-two.”
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