Wallflower j-3

by William Bayer

  She and her roommates had male guests; there'd clearly be no room for me unless I slept on the floor. In any event there'd be no privacy. I was furious. I'd told Millie I was coming, and she'd promised she'd save me space. We got into a fight, which led to my walking out in a snit. Steaming with anger, I decided to hell with research, I'd return immediately to Vermont.

  Back in Bennington, tired and depressed, I taxied to my dorm from the bus stop. Our room was empty. Cindy wasn't there. Feeling needy for her friendship, I decided to search her out.

  I found her finally, or rather should say I heard her, for it was her unique effervescent laughter that told me where she was. In a room on the floor below, belonging to Gretchen Hawes and Karen Tate, well-known campus lesbians, close buddies of Cindy's but not, I'm afraid, of mine.

  I don't know what made me hesitate before I knocked. Perhaps I was curious about what was inspiring so much giggling inside, afraid, too, that my depressed mood might bring the others down. I certainly didn't want to intrude and put a damper on their fun. So I stood outside the door and listened. And then I understood: they were talking about me.

  "She's too much, Cin. Too much," said Gretchen.

  "Well, I think she's very sweet," I heard Cindy reply.

  "You would. Seeing as how you've been on the receiving end."

  Laughter.

  "Sick, sick, sick," said Karen. they all broke up.

  "Play us some more. Come on, Cin. More!" Much giggling again, and then I couldn't believe what I heard. My own voice, on tape, begging Cindy to let me love her: "Please, Cin. I know just what you need. Please-let me do it. I can make you smile, you know I can. Please. "

  The blood rose, boiling, to my face. I felt as if the top of my head were about to explode. My voice! Begging to be allowed to pleasure her! And she recorded it! And was playing it now for them!

  "Hey, I've got an idea, Cin." Gretchen tittered. "Bring the little mouse down here one night. Share some of that 'please, please, please' with us, okay?"

  "I've got some special places she can do." Karen snickered. "So long as she begs for it." And then: "Sick, sick, sick!"

  I wanted to scream. Don't know why I didn't. I wanted to curl up, die right there on the floor. But instead I took hold of the doorknob and shoved the door open. The three of them were sprawled out on their stomachs on top of Karen's bed, the little tape player in the center. Six eyes met mine, laughing, defiant eyes. And then, when they realized I'd been listening, those six eyes turned mean.

  "Snooping, Bev?" Gretchen sneered.

  But I ignored her. I stared straight at Cindy. "You recorded me?"

  She shrugged, then smiled sheepishly. "Yeah, well, I guess I did."

  "How does it feel to be a rat?" I spat the words, then reached to the tape recorder and ripped out the cassette.

  "Hey, watch it!" said Karen. "You can screw up the machine. We were just having a little fun. God!"

  But I kept my eyes on Cindy and let her have it. "Is this your idea of fun?"

  "Get off your high horse, honeybunch," said Gretchen Hawes.

  "Eavesdropping at the door is like reading other people's mail. Do that, and you deserve what you get."

  I met their eyes with as much contempt as I could summon, then, bursting into tears, ran back to our room and flung myself onto my bed. "How could she? How could she? How could she?" I screamed into the pillow. I wept and wept and wept.

  Cindy turned up an hour later. She'd been drinking. I could smell the booze on her the minute she walked in. I pretended to be asleep. She was noisy as she undressed.

  It was clear she wanted to disturb me. Finally she spoke: "Stop faking, Bev. I know you're wide awake."

  "How could you do that to me?" I asked. "How could you?"

  "You kind of let yourself in for it if you know what I mean," she said.

  I sat up in bed. "Let myse@ in for it?"

  "Sure. The way you've been slinking around all winter, trying to get into my pants all the time. I mean, now and then it's fun, but when I asked you to be my roommate, I didn't know I'd be taking the, you know, lezzy route."

  "But it was you!"

  "Uh-uh, Bev. was you started it. I never put the make on you.

  I wouldn't want to." She snickered. "You don't turn me on."

  I stared at her. This was my Best Friend! "I turned you on plenty as I remember," I whispered bitterly.

  "Work your tongue around long enough you'll get a reaction. I'm just flesh and blood, you know." "So you never cared for me? Is that what you're saying?" "Frankly I like guys, but I try to understand other points of view. You know the saying 'Different strokes for different folks'? Right?"

  I rushed at her then, attacked her with flailing arms and nails. I wanted to scratch out her eyes. Being bigger and stronger, she overpowered me easily. Finally, when I was exhausted, pinned to the floor, she looked down on me and smiled her unforgettable smile.

  "Let's not make such a big deal out of this, huh? There're still a couple months till the end of the term.

  Let's try and get along, Bev. I'm sorry about playing the tape for those guys. I really am."

  Sorry about playing the tape! What about recording it? What else besides playing it did she have in mind when she taped me when I was most vulnerable?

  It all had been a setup, that much was clear; I'd loved her as best I could, but to her I'd been little more than a pest.

  The next day I packed up my stuff. She came into the room just as I was finishing.

  "Leaving, huh?"

  "What did you expect?"

  She shrugged. "Well, it was nice while it lasted, Bev. It's too bad you had to sneak back early on the weekend." Sneak back! The girl was incredible.

  "You hurt me, Cin. Hurt me a lot."

  "If I did, I'm sorry, I really am. I'm sure you'll get over it.

  When you do, I hope we can be friends." She shrugged again and left the room.

  Twenty years ago, and I never did get over it, Mama. And I never loved anyone carnally again. I'd learned the risks the hard way and didn't like them. Cindy was the best lover I ever had.

  That whole spring was miserable, that whole summer, too, not to mention the whole rest of my life. But as they say, you live and learn. And there was one good thing that came out of our relationship: Cindy steered me to my profession. On her advice I became a psychologist.

  By the following autumn, tired of suffering, I decided to concentrate on my anger. And then I began to have fantasies, delicious fantasies of Cindy begging me not to hurt her the way she'd hurt me.

  In response I shrugged and smiled and told her not to make such a big thing about it. I was going to kill her; that's all I was going to do. After all, she was only flesh and blood; isn't that what she'd said? And after she was dead, I was going to seal her up with glue.

  No big deal, right, Cin? Different strokes for different folks, right? Hub? Right?

  I'm looking now at the trophy Tool brought back from Seattle. The yearbook of our Bennington class. Nice book, though I'm not in it.

  Nice picture of Cindy as she was then, tossing back her head to flick away the long blond hair that always used to fall across her face.

  Reminds me a little of someone I've seen recently, same eyes, hair, same warming, radiant smile.

  Carl's bedazzled reaction when you broach taking the tool into your house: "Sometimes you surprise me, Bev."

  "I don't know what's so surprising, Carl. Diana's my patient, she's my responsibility, and since I've got an unrented basement apartment available, and she's going to be coming to me four days a week for therapy anyway… well, it just seems natural to throw in a little housing, too."

  "Sort of like a halfway house for her. That what you have in mind?"

  "Now that you mention it-sure, why not?"

  His little eyes dance a jig. "And you were so against her being released."

  "Never against it, Carl. Hesitant about proposing it, that's all."

  You shrug. "I gues
s you could call me conservative when it comes to murderesses."

  He strokes his beard, becoming grayer and more pointy by the month.

  "What about a job?"

  "There's a lot of possibilities right in the neighborhood-museums, institutes, archives. She's a trained librarian. She'll have no trouble finding a position."

  "Small-town Connecticut girl-think she can hack it in the city?"

  You put your hands on your hips. "I'm from Cleveland, Carl. I can hack it, so why not her?"

  He fondles his beard again. "Want to know what I think? I think you're one superduper human being. How's that)"

  You stare at him incredulously. "Well, thank you, Carl. I believe that's the first real compliment I've ever had from you. And we've worked together a lot of years."

  "We have, Bev. And pardon me for not being one of those bosses effusive with the praise. But when I say something like that, I mean every word of it. I think you're an incredibly talented shrink and a terrific person, too."

  Flattered and stunned, you shake your head. "I'm going to treasure what you're saying, Carl. It really means a lot."

  When you first noticed the tall blond girl in Diana's artial arts class, you knew she reminded you of someone though you couldn't put your finger on exactly whom. It was only later, after you asked Diana to get to know the girl and cultivate a friendship, that it struck you whom she reminded you of Cindy Morse, of course.

  Then you couldn't wait to get your hands on her. But you were patient. Patience, you might say, is your middle name. And Diana was clever about it, too, building the friendship slowly, exactly as you'd ordered.

  You'll never forget the evening Diana reported that she and Jess Foy had gone out for coffee after class. As you'd instructed, Diana told Jess she worked part-time at the New York Society Library and confided, too, in a most casual way, that she was in intensive therapy with a female shrink. Jess, in turn, informed Diana that she was a student at Columbia, where she was also on the women's varsity fencing team. She herself had never gone to a therapist, she said, although there were times when she was sorely tempted, what with the pressures of college and all. The girls chatted about karate, gossiped about the sensei, and exchanged tales of their initial embarrassment at having to change clothes in the unisex dojo locker room. But then, giggling, each admitted to the other that she now deliberately took no special pains to conceal herself when undressing.

  "Let the novice hard-ons drool, that's my motto," Jess told Diana.

  Diana reported how much she liked her new friend and was pleased at your instruction to nurture the relationship and make it grow.

  Beverly Archer and Diana Proctor both were aware that the stakes were high and that for each of them, in separate as well as connected ways, it would be a night of destiny. Depending on the outcome, Beverly would learn whether the course she had embarked upon obsessively so many years before would finally lead to the attainment of her goals. For Diana the night would prove whether her murderous passions, once raging and inco herent, now disciplined and honed, could be applied to the completion of Beverly's design.

  As the day ended, the strain 'between the women, always apparent on account of the extreme polarity of their roles, seemed to increase with the inexorable withering of the light. Beverly was more snappish than usual; Diana, quieter and more withdrawn. As night settled in, there was a palpable tension in the secondfloor bedroom, where they waited, silent, before the large portrait of Beverly's mother in the niche.

  Beverly had turned on the red lamps so that the chamber was curiously illuminated, suffused with crimson light redolent of blood. She wore the same scarlet dress as was depicted in the portrait, a dress that had once belonged to her mother and that she'd had altered to fit her shorter, plumper frame. But there was something anomalous about her in that particular costume, designed to be worn by a featured singer in a nightclub. And since Beverly had refused to have it dry-cleaned, it still reeked faintly of tobacco, alcohol, and sweat, the signature aroma of her mother's professional milieu.

  Diana Proctor, dressed in the costume of a night killer, full-length black bodysuit, black sneakers, tight-fitting close-cropped black wig, black latex gloves, had two ice picks fitted into leather holsters strapped to the insides of her forearms. In a small waist sack, suspended from her belt, rested a caulking gun loaded up with glue and, wrapped carefully in tissue paper, a withered field daisy collected that morning from Central Park. An hour later Diana, in a loose denim jacket that concealed the ice picks, sat alone at the end of a subway car on a sparsely filled downtown express. The train hurtled through the tunnels, swaying and moaning, wheels grinding against the tracks. to a neutral observer Diana might have appeared drugged and in a daze. In fact, she was visualizing, a process taught to her by her therapist in preparation for the important act she was on her way to perform.

  She got off her train at Union Square, took the exit stairs that led directly to the park above. Once outside she sniffed the night air, clean and cool, then made her way east along Fourteenth. It was a quiet weekday evening; traffic was sparse, and there were few pedestnans. As Diana approached Second Avenue, she began to look around. She was searching for a quarry, not a stray cat or dog, not even a jogger to prick in the butt with a pin. Tonight she was stalking something bigger. She was looking for a human she could kill. Unbeknownst to Diana, Beverly Archer was close by. While Diana had waited uptown for her express, Beverly had left her house, hailed a cab, then ordered the driver to speed south to East Fourteenth and Second.

  Now she stood in a phone booth, phone in hand as if making a call, waiting for Diana to appear. She saw the girl, springy and taut, ready to strike, moving rapidly toward her. Though tense herself, Beverly was filled with pride. The girl approaching was a weapon she had forged, a tool trained to kill on command. On her command.

  Diana, unaware of Beverly, continued east on Fourteenth. On First Avenue she turned south, and then after two blocks, east again on Twelfth.

  After ten minutes of walking she entered the so-called Alphabet City section of Manhattan, where the avenues are lettered A, B, C, and D.

  This was a neighborhood of broken-down tenements and vacant buildings turned into crack houses. Here, behind the garbage cans in the alleys, one could find occasional homeless persons sleeping curled in messes of tattered blankets.

  After exploring this area for a quarter of an hour, Diana located three possible quarries. Her first choice was an old man, sleeping and wheezing noisily, his body curled just inside the back doorway of an abandoned store. He had covered himself with a long piece of cardboard. His cheeks bore a grayish stubble, and locks of iron gray hair surrounded his ears.

  Diana stood poised, staring down at him, thinking out how best to proceed. She had rehearsed the procedure numerous times, both with Doctor and alone, and it was certainly not as if she had never attacked live people before. But still, she hesitated. This man meant nothing to her. He had never abused her. He had no meaning in her life.

  "It will be a cold kill," Doctor had explained, "the most difficult kind to bring off. Yet because it will be cold, it will be an excellent test. If you have trouble with the coldness, you can always warm it up. Just imagine your target is a person who has shamed you, hurt you in a way no apology can repair. Put a little bit of your mother into him if you like, your grandmother and sister, too. Remember, Diana, you're well practiced with the picks. It's not the killing but the gluing that's going to draw upon your strength."

  Diana stared down at the sleeping man, wheezing and sputtering in the night. But it wasn't thoughts of members of her own family that fired her up to strike. It was the elegantly coiffed redheaded singer in the scarlet dress on Doctor's wall who thought up all the awful punishments. Yes, it was Mama lying there beneath the cardboard. Mama who deserved to die!

  In a series of moves as quick and balletic as the ones she'd used on numerous dummies, Diana Proctor attacked the old man's throat. A moment later the belabored wheezin
g stopped.

  Off now with the cardboard cover. A series of quick flicks with the utility knife and the encrusted trousers were cut loose. The fly zipper was already open. Diana pulled off the shoes, wrapped in filthy towels, then placed a heel in her victim's crotch and hauled the tom-up trousers down.

  Doctor had been most specific about the way she wanted her enemies desexed. Female organs were to be filled and pinched shut, male organs glued back between the legs. Using her black-sneakered foot to pull down the stained underdrawers, Diana exposed her quarry's blue and flaccid genitals to the air. Then she pulled out her caulking gun and set to work. When she was finished, she unwrapped the withered field daisy and lovingly placed it in the doorway beside the building wall.

  Beverly waited for Diana in an all-night bookstore on Third Avenue near Twelfth. Browsing titles on a table of Specials amp; Bargains, she glanced up every so often at the large plate glass window facing the street. Diana had to pass by here after she had completed her mission; it was on her prescribed route home.

  A few minutes past midnight Beverly caught sight of the lynx, elegant in her black garb, approaching from down the avenue. Beverly hurried out of the shop to intercept her. was that a killer's glow she saw on the little murderess's face?

  For Diana this meeting was unexpected. Surprised, perhaps even frightened, she asked Doctor if she had done something wrong. Beverly, instead of answering, placed both hands on Diana's arms, then ran them along the girl's sleeves. Feeling only one pick beneath Diana's jacket, she expressed her pleasure with a grin.

  "Problems?" she asked. Diana shook her head. "Bring a trophy back for Mama?"

  Diana nodded, reached into her pocket, handed Beverly a carefully folded piece of paper, an advertising flyer for a fortune-teller resident in the neighborhood.

  "He wasn't carrying much," she explained.

  Beverly, pleased with the flyer, understood. "It's not the monetary value of the trophy that's important to Mama, dear. It's the way it speaks of the victim's mentality."

  Alone in a taxi, on her way uptown, Beverly trembled with exhilaration.