Why this is, I don’t entirely know, and I don’t much care. Some cynical scientist somewhere would surely cry biology in my face, and claim that my admiration for women’s breasts and hips and haircuts is pheromone based and unconscious. Well, I’ve got a bullet for that guy too. Any man whose craving for women isn’t rooted in his spirit will never be ableto honor women the way I do. And any woman who can’t learn to revel in her own body—who loathes being put on a pedestal by herself or by a man—isn’t worth my time. I’m only putting her on the pedestal so I can join her up there, anyway. At midnight, in the room where I sleep, when I cross a woman’s wrists at the small of her back, and hold her stripped to her underthings before a mirror, I’m asking her not only to feel the power I have over her, but to see and understand and love the power that she has over me. I want her to know that just being near her body, her gestures, thrills and pleases me, as much as and maybe more than plain old fucking would.
It takes a long while for most women to come around to my brand of intimacy, if they do at all. Like a painter who has models sit for him, I usually only hold my women for about an hour at a time, and I never have the same woman in my bedroom more than once a week. Still, many of them leave after that first hour—that first night—insulted that I haven’t humped them. Trust me, the ones who run away that fast are lost anyway. They’re doomed to futures and marriages barren of the long, slow sensuality that yields fire between men and women. The women who come back to my bedroom, though, are the glorious ones, the ones who are willing to endure the ache of detachment. I hold these women on their feet before my mirror, and they quickly learn the rules.
The rules are, the woman wears her brassiere and underwear and whatever dress I’ve bought her and shredded and tied around her neck. I wear and, at this point, never remove my suit. There are no kisses or caresses, no words exchanged, no laughter, no music. I hold the woman’s wrists crossed behind her back, and I keep a ruthlessly tight grip. This way the woman knows she is helpless. She knows I can take her if I want to. But after a while—when she understands that I’m not going to take her, but keeps returning to me anyway—an amazing thing happens. The woman begins to forget that I’m there. She stares at herself, gets to know her body, and, hopefully, comes to love what she sees, comes to understand that the creature in the mirror is something extraordinary, elegant, wrapped in dignity, something not meant to be taken lightly or grabbed at and denuded too quickly.
Sometimes, women get wild over themselves. Some thrash and try to tear one of their hands free so they can jam it down between their thighs. I never let this happen. I want them to come just as much as they want themselves to, but I want to be part of it, and I want our joy to be enormous. So, after a month or so of half-naked nights in the mirror, I up the ante and move the woman to my bed. She often presumes the time has come to fuck, but she’s mistaken. I’ll tell you how it happened with Eva, just last month.
“Walk over to the bed,” I told her.
Eva obeyed. It was a warm August Thursday—I always have Eva over on Thursdays—and Eva stood at the foot of the bed. A light midnight breeze from my open window blew Eva’s silk scarf around her shoulders. The scarf was light gray. An hour before, it had been a dress.
I walked over, stood facing Eva. I’m a foot taller than she.
“Do you remember how much that dress cost me?” I asked.
“Twenty-two hundred and nine dollars and seventy-seven cents,” said Eva.
Eva’s perfume, Serendipity, was rich in my nostrils. All my women wear Serendipity.
“Are you impressed,” I asked, “by the money I spend on you?”
Eva nodded. Outside my window there was moonlight on the Hudson.
“Are you worth it?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Eva.
“Are you beautiful?” I asked.
“I’m breathtaking,” said Eva. She didn’t smile, and she kept her hands at her sides while she spoke. She kept her eyes on mine. She was ready.
“Take off your underwear,” I said, “and your brassiere. Leave your scarf on.”
Eva obeyed quickly, then stood before me, hands at her sides. Eva’s parents are both professional auto mechanics, so that meant that when Eva removed her underclothes in front of me, I saw a naked nineteen-year-old German au pair with hefty breasts who could sing sweet songs to children and weld a broken car chassis. Intoxicating.
“You’re incredible,” I said, looking her over.
“Are you going to touch me?” Eva asked. She knew by now not to assume.
I shook my head. “I’m going to tie you up. Lie down on the bed, on your back, with your head on my pillow.”
Many women, quite content to be held, refuse to be lashed to bedposts. Eva’s not one of them.
“Get your ankles and wrists as close to the four bedposts as possible.”
Eva did this. I fetched some old ties from a box under my bed and tied Eva up tight.
“Now what?” asked Eva.
I smiled down at her. “Now I call my friends.”
Gang rapist! you’re thinking. Pervert and freak!
Listen, stop assuming you know me. I already told you that you can’t relate because your brother was never Guppied to death. So, unless you’re in the business of binding women to bedposts on a pretty much nightly basis, don’t pretend to know how I go about it and why.
“Don’t make a sound,” I instructed Eva. “No matter what happens when the crowd arrives, don’t make a sound.”
Eva looked up at me. The gray silk was coiled around her neck and one end of it had slunk down to her abdomen. She had some natural human fear in her eyes, but she nodded her consent. God, is Eva sensual.
I promptly left my bedroom, and closed the door behind me. I picked up the phone and summoned my friends, as I do most nights around midnight. A strange fact about me is that I require only about two hours of sleep a day, usually from six A.M. to eight A.M. This has been the case since the day Guppy killed Francis. I don’t know whether my body feels it needs to be on alert for homicidal maniacs in fish suits or what, but the fact is, when night falls, I almost never get exhausted the way other people do. Usually, after I’ve held a stripped-down woman in front of my mirror and then sent her home, I just get bored, and I have to gather an artillery of characters to keep myself interested in living.
Here are the people I call. I call Jeremy Jax, my old college roommate, who’s currently playing the part of a disgruntled mouse in an off-Broadway play. I’ve never seen the play and won’t because seeing people dressed as giant mice would remind me of Guppy and I just might draw my SIG and start shooting. Jeremy, though, is amusingly morose, and hapless with women. It gives me great pleasure to chat and drink whiskey with Jeremy in my living room. He tells me of his nonexistent sex life, never knowing that I have a naked young woman bound and waiting for me in the next room.
I also call Nicole Bonner, a girl who lives many flights above me, and Walter Glorybrook, a hot-dog vendor who lives one flight down. My building is called the Preemption apartment building, and it’s understood to be a gothic, nocturnal haunt, where commencing a party at midnight on a weekday is par for the course. I call this guy Checkers, aheadhunter, and I sometimes wake my roommate, James Branch, a real loner, and force him to enjoy himself with others. I also call women, a clutch of beautiful Manhattan women, all of whom know when they come that I have one of their kind bound to my bed. Each of them has been bound for hours in exactly that condition, helpless, sworn to silence, forced to listen to clinking glasses while she dozes, watches the moon, curses me, pines for me, or pines for herself.
It’s always the same. The women know my love and respect for their bodies, while the men know nothing about me, except that I like to drink with them and hear their stories. These men are nowhere near me in wealth, and if their endless ravings about pussy and politics reveal their true selves, they don’t share my watchfulness for God and absurdity. This is fine with me. Just because I work to keep
the Commandments doesn’t mean I consider myself a judge of human character or anything approaching a mouthpiece for God. I’m far too singular in my obsessions, and my friends are free to snort cocaine or pillage or love Jesus as their consciences dictate. In any case, I’m only having these guys over for drinks and laughs. I believe they consider me a rich, sleepless, congenial vampire, a creature who’s probably up to something shady that, luckily, doesn’t involve destroying them.
As for the women, they have no need to dress seductively, but they do anyway. As I said, I usually invite only women whom I’ve held and bound in my bedroom, and gathering these veterans together thrills me to no end. Many of them show up repeatedly, despite knowing that all the other women there share the same physical past with me. At any moment these women might band together, charge my unlocked bedroom, and, in bacchic jealousy, tear to pieces whichever Eva or Julie or Justine they find bound there. However, this never happens. Instead, I talk with these women. I make conversation, something I’ve never done with them in the bedroom, something most of them crave more than sex. I might touch one woman’s wrist as she’s pouring herself a gin, and ask her whether she has siblings. I might sit down beside a woman on my couch, our knees bumping lightly, and ask her what music she loves. These questions—so trivial on most dates—carry weight and charm, because I’ve known these women so long. I’ve reversed the standard progression. I already know the woman’s physical form so intimately despite never having fucked her—and she’s gotten so comfortable with her body in my presence—that everything we say to each other now is a focused delight. We can talk freely, without convention or expectation, and I listen to the woman—who’s already shown that she can be candid and vulnerable—and I begin to care for her immensely.
The last step of my night is this. After I’ve sent my friends away, and my roommate has gone to bed, and I’ve untied Eva or whomever and dressed her and sent her home, too, without even a kiss good-bye, there will be one woman left. She will be a woman whom, over the course of months, I have held before my mirror, and bound naked to my bed, and talked with at my parties. She will be a woman I’ve chosen earlier in the night to be the one. I’ll have asked her upon her arrival not to drink anything alcoholic that night, to keep her mind and spirit free. She’ll have hidden in the bathroom while I send away that night’s bed-bound woman. Then, out of my bathroom, at five A.M., will come a woman who so knows herself and trusts my care for her that when she lies naked and unbound on my bed, and I—naked before her for the first time—join her and kiss her lips and put my fingers to the ribs over her heart, she can orgasm almost immediately, from the slightest touch. I am totally serious about this. Plenty more touching ensues, the nature of which it would be ungentlemanly to reveal. Suffice it to say that, without fornication or traditional intercourse, the woman and I reach sexual peaks and realms that would make angels want to be human. When we’re satisfied and exhausted, then my two hours of sleep curl close to me, and I hold the woman tight and smell her hair and the pain in my chest, the death of my Francis, fades for a while.
Let the interrogation begin. Why? Why? Why? you ask. Why can’t I resign myself to Francis’s death? What would the Church say about my exploits with women? And why so many women? Why not choose just one, one who can make me happy, make me laugh, one whom I can marry? Well, to answer you honestly, how the fuck should I know? I’m only telling you what works for me, what keeps me from putting a bullet in my heart. As to Francis, I’m not going to elaborate on every plate of candy I ever shared with my brother, every memory I have of him, just to garner sympathy or paint a poignant background for my motives. In the first place, it would kill me to do so, and, secondly, I already told you I don’t owe you anything. As to loving so many women, my basic understanding is this. When I meet the woman who’ll make me need and want only her, then I won’t need and want all the others. Maybe this particular woman, the one for me, is grown and gorgeous and right here in New York. Maybe she’s barely eighteen in Tahiti. All I know is, when she meets me and stands before my mirror, she’ll fall achingly in love with herself like no other woman has yet, and I will see this and pounce and never let her go.
As far as my sex life and Mother Church are concerned, I would say that, in the spaces between His commandments, God allows us to proceed with as much tenderness and self-sufficiency as we can muster. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for more character development on the Father Merchant front, you’re shit out of luck. I know the man about as well as my male party guests know me, which is to say not at all. I’m not a full-fledged St. Benedict’s parishioner, and I’ve never even seen Father Merchant except when he’s in the pulpit and I’m in the darkness behind the candles. It’s better that way. I’m detached from any sympathies Father Merchant might have for me, and it’s his job not to get clouded by such sympathies anyway. When you’re being charitable, or loving somebody, you’re not supposed to let your right hand know what your left hand is doing. This means it’s none of your business how much money I send my dad or give to Church organizations, and it’s not my business to tell you. In fact, if I were a better man, I wouldn’t have told you that I give anything at all. That’s the problem with my confessing anything, whether it’s to a priest or some random like you. I have to be ruthless with myself and not reveal too much about the way I kiss and cling to women, because you’ll start thinking it’s your job to understand or pity or fix me.
After all, I’m only human, and I might break all the rulesI just told you I live by. With my gun and my sensitivityabout Francis’s death, I could get homicidal pretty quickly, ifanybody ever really fucked with me. And you’re probably thinking that with all these beautiful women I tie up, I could cross the line into rape at any second. Well, sure. I’m stronger than any woman I’ve ever held, and I could very easily pop Francis’s fish-head helmet—which I keep under my bed—over some woman’s head so she’d be blinded and confused and anonymous. Then I could bang away at her body to my heart’s content. I could do it just as easily as I could shoot my roommate, and I’d be concocting absurdity if I did it. The woman might be begging me to stop, but if she had a Largemouth bass head, I’d have trouble respecting her argument.
He’s psychotic, you’re thinking. He’s a freak and a monster. Well, I haven’t done it yet, have I? I haven’t raped or murdered anybody, have I? I’ve made many women happy, and even shared breakfast with some. Just this morning Eva was in my bed, and we were both sitting up, naked, with warm sheets and blankets heaped on our shoulders like we were king and queen. We were eating grapefruit and looking out the window at a bird who was chirping for the dawn to come. The sky was silver.
“What kind of bird is that?” asked Eva. “A sparrow?”
“It’s a pterodactyl,” I said.
Eva grinned. “Pterodactyls are extinct. They roamed the earth long ago, with Triceratops.”
Eva and I each had our own grapefruit. We each had our own bowl and our own spoon.
“It’s a phoenix, then,” I said.
Eva nudged me. “Phoenixes are mythological. They burn themselves up, then rise from their own ashes.”
The bird kept chirping. I kissed Eva’s pale, warm shoulder.
“It’s just a little sparrow,” said Eva.
“No,” I said. “It’s something wonderful.”
* * *
* * *
The Smoker
Douglas Kerchek taught twelfth-grade advanced-placement English at St. Agnes High School, on West Ninety-seventh and Broadway, and Nicole Bonner was the standout girl in his class. She was the tallest, at five foot ten, the oldest, at nineteen, and the smartest, with a flawless A. She wasn’t the prettiest, Douglas thought—not beside the spunky nose of Rhonda Phelps or Meredith Beckermann’s heart-shaped derriere—but Nicole was dangerously alluring. She had a chopped, black Cleopatra haircut, and wise blue eyes, and her recent essay on Othello had ended with this note:
Dear Mr. Kerchek:
Last night in bed
I read Fear + Loathing in L.V. It is puerile, self-involved gamesmanship. I suppose I don’t love drugs enough, although my parents make me drink brandy with them every night. They consider it a gesture of affection.
I saw you yesterday, outside the locker room, changing your shoes to go running, and your ankle looked quite blue. What did you bang it on?
Respectfully,
Nicole Bonner
This note caused Douglas some concern. He himself disliked Hunter S. Thompson, but Nicole had also written “in bed” and mentioned his bruise. It was Nicole’s habit to do this, to call out random, intimate specifics from the world around her and bring them to Douglas’s attention. She’d done it that day in class.
“Iago is filled with lust, Mr. Kerchek,” said Jill Eckhard.
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