by phuc
"We're following a normal investigative protocol," Spence said. "And the next time you decide to give a lecture open to public, you will notify me first. At least then we'll be able to give you some protection."
Protection, she thought. Is that what she needed? Did they actually think that this woman might try to kill her?
Spence adjusted his tie for no apparent reason. At least he dressed well. "Have you had any further contact with our friend?" he asked.
"No. I only get a carrier from my editor once a week."
"What about the normal mail channels?"
"I'm unlisted. So don't worry."
"Oh, but I am worrying. Your obliviousness amazes me, as does your outright refusal to acknowledge the gravity of this matter. And, by the way, I thought your lecture was heinously biased, unrealistic, self serving, and ideologically useless." Spence let his stare soak a moment.
Then he added, "I'll be in touch."
Eat shit, Kathleen thought. She winced at him as if shooting a gun. She would have liked to kick him in the pants as he strode toward the back of the auditorium to further his harassment of the red haired women. What nerve, she thought.
"Wow," Platt remarked. "What was that all about?"
"Long story," she excused. What could she say? Well, you see, the other day a female killer mailed me a severed penis, and that guy is the cop investigating the case. And he doesn't like me because I happen to be a woman. She felt like a dissident in some totalitarian regime, shadowed by policemen. Spence's audacity was outrageous, unconscionable.
"You want to go somewhere and have a drink?" Platt said.
Kathleen wasn't sure if he wanted to have a drink with her or just wanted a ride home; Platt didn't have a car. She didn't care, though. The innocuous talk helped get her mind off Spence, and she found something comfortable about chatting idly with another writer, despite how little they had in common creatively. She drove downtown in somewhat of a daze; then they were sitting in a bar. But only after her first drink did she realize exactly what bar it was. Jonah and the Whale, the same bar where Stephen W. Calabrice had made the last pickup of his life.
"I kind of lied," she admitted. "I didn't really hear much of your talk; I was really late. But I liked your poem."
"I've written better," Platt said, "and I've written worse, a lot worse. Poetry's weird; it never succeeds unless the poet realizes its utter failure."
"That sounds like something a poet would say." She sipped her Cardinal. Platt on the other hand ordered the cheapest beer they had on tap, which seemed appropriate for a poet. "I guess none of us succeed as real people," she theorized, "unless we realize all our own failures."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, like your poem, ‘Exit.' It was about failure. It was an acknowledgment of your failure with a woman."
Platt nearly spat out his beer. "How did you I mean, what makes you think that?"
Did I touch a nerve? Kathleen hadn't meant to. "I only assumed... That's not what the poem was about?"
"That's another thing about poetry. It's about whatever the reader perceives it as being about."
Yeah, I touched a nerve, she thought. The first drink went frightfully fast. Platt was nursing his; he mustn't have much money. The bar seemed fairly full for a week night: legs flashing beneath sleek dresses, guys in expensive suits checking the time to deliberately show off their Rolexes.
Mecca of Yuppies. Her thoughts felt split like logs. She ordered another drink, chatting and thinking. Then she ordered another drink. Music droned: some dismal song by The Cure.
"Do you make a living writing poetry?" she asked.
Platt threw his head back and laughed, a bit too loudly. "I teach a couple classes at GW. There's no money in poetry but that's how it's supposed to be. It wouldn't be real if you got paid for it.
Whenever I get offered money for a poem, I send the check back. If it was an article, or an expository piece, that would be different; I'd take money for that." Platt sipped his beer. "This may sound corny, but poetry comes from my heart. And my heart is not for sale."
It didn't sound corny only because of the indifference with which he'd made the statement. At least he has convictions, Kathleen thought. She wondered what her own convictions were and couldn't think of any. My hormones are skewed tonight. Images and thoughts sideswiped her; she listened to Platt but often didn't hear him over her own ponderings. The music and the voices and bodies around them coalesced to gentle chaos. The macabre question titillated her: Exactly what had the killer done to Stephen W. Calabrice? Spence said he'd been tortured.
"What?" she said.
"I said you should order some food."
"Not hungry." She'd ordered another Cardinal without really realizing it. Platt's suggestion was a polite reminder as to how much alcohol she'd consumed. I'm not drunk, am I? she thought. She almost never drank to excess; getting drunk made her feel stupid. She often found a silly joy in watching others get drunk in bars. They knew they'd get drunk, they knew they'd make asses of themselves eventually, yet they continued to drink. "Have you ever thought," she said to Platt (and for the life of her she couldn't remember his first name), "about the actual social symptomatology of drinking? It's absurd. It's like bars are places where people go because it's acceptable to make jackasses of themselves."
"I've, uh, I never thought of it that way," Platt said with a brow tightening.
"I mean, look at this. People would never act like this in other public places, would they?"
Behind them, three young guys in baggy Dockers laughed uproariously. One of them chugged a full bottle of dark brown beer in less than 15 seconds. At another table, two girls giggled as their dates conversed loudly about their jobs. A girl at the end of the bar shouted to the barkeep, "Hey, Craig, can I have your kids?" It was an arena of silliness. An overdressed dolt with a face like Chris Isaak squeezed next to her and ordered a Stoplight shooter as his friends cheered him on.
Chaos, Kathleen thought.
"I guess we better go," Platt said.
"Why?"
"You seem pretty bored."
"I'm sorry," she said. He must think she didn't like him. "I'm not bored, I'm thinking. I have this habit of thinking about lots of things at once."
Platt at last ordered a second beer. "What are you thinking about?"
"I... Well..." But what was she thinking about? She scanned the long bar for redheads. She wondered where the killer had sat, what she'd worn, what type of drinks she'd had. What had Stephen W. Calabrice's last drink on earth been? I hope it was a good one, she thought.
Eventually, she answered Platt, as more overdressed patrons squeezed past, "A project."
"You mean a writing project?"
"Yeah." She caught Platt's brow ticking again when she ordered another Cardinal. "You're a writer. Have you ever considered writing a book?"
Finally she'd given him something to talk about. "Oh, sure," he said. "I'm always toying with the idea of writing a novel, but I know I never will. I prefer poetry. It seems to me I mean for my own creative purposes that even the best novel can never be more truthful creatively than a poem. You never know what your motives are with a novel."
"What do you mean?"
"Is the novel motivated by money, by status, or by aesthetics? You never know," he said.
"Why can't it be all three?"
"Well, it can, but that doesn't appeal to me. I know a lot of novelists, and most of them are just prostitutes. Soon they're writing books based on the needs of the market instead of the needs of their muse."
Kathleen thought about that. These were more of Platt's convictions. She remembered what Spence had implied at the police station: that she was looking to sensationalize a tragedy. That wasn't it at all. Maybe she just wanted something to do.
"What about you?" Platt asked. "Are you considering writing a novel?"
"I'm not sure if it's a novel. It might be, or it might not be, or it might be something in between."
<
br /> The Cardinal was making her buzz a little. "All I know is that it will be a book."
"What's the book going to be about?"
"A killer," she said. She sipped the rich drink, closed her eyes. "It's about a female psycho killer."
| |
Chapter 7
(I)
When Kathleen woke, at about 6 a.m., she had to pressure her brain to give up the memory.
Where am I? she thought at first, and then the headache reminded her. She lay seeping with sweat; Platt's apartment, an efficiency off of P Street, was not air conditioned. Morning light poured in from the balcony as if caught off guard, Kathleen quickly pulled the sheet up over her.
Platt lay asleep beside her.
You bad girl, Kathleen. What would the radio shrink say about this? That she'd gotten drunk on purpose as a ploy to sleep with Platt? And we did more than sleep, she reminded herself.
Extended periods of inactivity in your sex life, the radio shrink would say, have imbued rigid feelings of self doubt. Not having sex makes you feel unwanted. In becoming intoxicated, you have manufactured a situation which will increase the potential of a sexual encounter.
Is that what I did? she wondered now. She only vaguely recalled Platt's insistence that she not drive home. "You're too drunk," he'd said. "I'll call you a cab, or I'll drive us in your car back to my place. I'll sleep on the couch." Platt had not taken advantage of her by any means. Kathleen supposed the opposite, that she took advantage of him. She took a cold shower, checked herself to see that her period had stopped. Her pubic hair looked a little straggly so she stood there ludicrously over the toilet trimming at it with a little pair of scissors she found in the cabinet. It was all so calculated that she scarcely believed it of herself.
He was lying on the couch, as promised, under a sheet, when she emerged wrapped in a towel. A small lamp glowed; he was reading a book of Anne Sexton poems called The Death Notebooks.
For a moment his long straight blond hair made him look girlish. Maybe he's gay, she considered.
P Street and Dupont was certainly a gay area. But the poem he'd read was about a girl; she felt certain of that. He looked up at her then and said, "The bed's right over th "
"I'd rather sleep here," she said. She turned off the light, let the towel fall, and climbed on top of him, squeezing Anne Sexton between their chests as they kissed. At first Platt was stifled, not quite sure what to make of this. In the dark she felt completely unrestrained; she felt like someone else, someone she was watching in a dirty movie, or someone people gossiped about.
She knelt beside the couch, pulled the sheet off, pulled off his briefs. His skin felt smooth and cool as she ran her hands up and down his right side. She let her hands be her eyes in the dark, and was content by what she saw. No, he's not gay, she concluded; his penis average length, thin, and uncircumcised had already become erect before she even touched it. She squeezed it gently; Platt stifled a moan. I have a man's penis in my hand, she realized, and I don't even remember his first name! How embarrassing. She leaned over and began to fellate him; he stifled another moan. She let her tongue glaze over the glans, wiping away small drops of salty, precursory fluid.
His hand slid up and down her back as his legs stiffened. "Kathleen," he whispered. "You better stop. I'm getting ready." At least he's a gentleman, she thought. She didn't care; in fact, she was flattered, remembering the old joke about a man's three biggest lies: I love you, I was just about to call, and I promise not to come in your mouth. His testicles, caged in her fingers, drew up. She noticed with some fascination that the right one drew up farther than the left, and that it was minutely larger. Her mouth sucked harder, increasing the wet friction, and there he went again, whispering in panic, "Kathleen, Kathleen..." "Um hmm," was all the reply she was able to make at the moment. She could sense with her lips a nervous throbbing building up. When he began to ejaculate, she squeezed his testicles; the right one by now had all but constricted into his groin.
She'd only done this a few times before. I hope I'm doing it right. Is it the same for men? Even her own past could attest: of the times when men had gone down on her not many times there were an array of ways to do it wrong. You practically had to read off a list of guidelines. She flinched at the first few spurts which launched to the back of her throat. His fingers ranged in her shower wet hair. When she was done, she let the fair volume of semen fall out of her mouth onto his stomach.
"Let's get you cleaned up," she said. She felt around in the dark for a Kleenex but found none.
Would it be rude to wipe him off with his sheet? Maybe I should have swallowed it, she thought, but she really didn't want to do that. "There's no tissues here," he said, and suddenly there was a tearing sound. Kathleen laughed. "It that how poets smite each other?" she asked. "Actually," he said, "it's sort of an esoteric compliment. I wouldn't consider it an insult at all, creation merging with creation." He wiped himself off with a page he'd ripped out of the Anne Sexton book.
He brought her to her feet in the dark. She was glad for the dark he couldn't see her fat. She felt deliciously hot in the un air conditioned apartment. "Come on," he said, leading her toward the bed. "The condoms are over here."
«« »»
After another cool shower, she sneaked around the efficiency, draped in the sheet from the couch.
Platt snored slightly, brazenly naked on the bed. Nearly as brazenly herself, she stepped onto the balcony in the dawn light and smoked a cigarette. Below stretched an ugly pay parking lot beside P Street. The man in the booth looked like Uncle Sammy until she blinked and saw that he was black. Another man walking briskly down the street with a briefcase looked like Uncle Sammy too. She blinked him away. Retrograde shock jags, the counselor had called them. Not hallucinations but tricks of memory. She hadn't had them in years. Why now? What's Sam doing now? she asked herself. Masturbating in his cell? Thinking of me? she wondered. Then she thought about the killer, who, according to the all knowing Lieutenant Spence, had also been sexually abused. Who had abused the killer? And how? At what age and how many times?
She would have to know all these things for the book. And if the killer never wrote to her again, there'd be no book. Spence's threat loomed: "Do not tamper with evidence." She made a mental note: Call New York, ask about mail.
Back inside, she perused Platt's work space, which was much less organized than her own. A little Brother electric typewriter sat on a big desk with a fake woodgrain top. A piece of paper hung out of the platen like a tongue. Creative people often had quirks. Weird superstitions about new work. Territorialism. Was she violating some poetic law by looking? But Platt remained asleep, now curled into a naked ball. On the paper, he'd typed: EXIT by Maxwell Platt
Maxwell! Kathleen celebrated. Now at least she knew his first name. But hadn't "Exit" been the title of the poem he'd read at the writers lecture? This was different.
Through twilit nights
my love still soars.
I am forever
and ineffably yours.
One the desk rested a manila folder. Dare I? she thought. She had no right to look at his work without his permission. She looked at it anyway; poets intrigued her, especially poets who gave her orgasms. The first poem in the folder read, again:
EXIT by Maxwell Platt
Did he title all his poems "Exit?" An exit fixation, she thought. Like my killer fixation. The poem, dated December 12, 1990, read:
Ah, love it leaves us bleakly blessed,
either that or sweetly cursed.
I watch you take your heart from me,
you watch my heart burst.
But upon this night, exactly one year ago,
I remember: you and I were kissing in the snow.
Kathleen closed the folder. She felt ashamed, even though Platt would never know. My God, she thought when she looked down. Leaning against the corner of his work area stood a stack of publications, four feet high: magazines, newspapers, trade sized digests, smal
l press and literary journals all the places Platt had been published. It was literally a pillar of poetry. She picked up the top magazine, The Annapolis Critique, and thumbed the contents.
EXIT by Maxwell Platt... page 8
Yet another poem called "Exit." This began to fascinate her. She turned to page 8 and read: I always got less
than the least from you.
Now I hope that the rats
come and feast on you.