“This is so illuminating, Sunny, to hear your thoughts. Tell me, would you agree that the more feminine a man is, the less masculine he is?”
“Y-yeah. I … guess.” There was something so disorienting about her voice, her presence … like a vase of jonquils in a small room.
“Oh, I think you have,” she said. “And just before, you put forward a more intriguing and subtle variation on this—namely that men can be understood in terms of their absence of femininity. They’re defined by characteristics they lack—behavior they don’t display. This has been the traditional way of thinking of females. Even with the crucial child bearing capability, women have often been viewed as incomplete or failed men—Eve born of Adam’s rib. You’ve quietly turned this around and made femininity the standard by which men are defined. It’s not in fact how full of masculinity, it’s how empty of femininity that defines a ‘man.’ That’s an intriguing alternative perspective. How empty are you, Sunny? That’s a question society has been wrestling with for quite some time.”
“They’re wrestling with my masculinity?”
“What else is there to do with masculinity? I can think of only one thing. Hm, two things.”
“All right,” I said, confused. “Let me ask you a question. Go back to the figures on the wall. What would you do if you were the female in that situation?”
She summoned back the primitive figures with the remote.
“For starters, the arrival of an intruding male would come as no surprise. It would be something I’d been planning for—and counting on. I would’ve heightened the danger and drama of this in my male’s mind. Wherever we were, we’d make it a habit to assume not just a defensive position, because unless you have great numbers, what makes a good defensive position is exactly what makes it as hard to launch an attack from as an attack against. Instead, we’d rely on the guerilla tactic of chicanes and booby traps. With skill, these can be hastily assembled and tailored to the immediate terrain and environment. Indeed they must be seamless with the environment to remain undetected.”
As she spoke, the stick figures on the wall demonstrated the construction of various snares.
“These same skills would benefit our hunting activities,” she continued. “And this is perhaps the real answer to your question. We’d always be hunting—just as I am now. We wouldn’t just be anticipating an intruder, we’d be hoping for one.”
“You’d want to be attacked?” I puzzled.
“Yes!” she said with a serrated edge to her voice, as the Cro-Magnon cartoon took a very insidious turn. “Think of it as inviting guests. My current male and I have fortified our position. We appear to be in the open and easy to attack. In reality, a natural pit has been disguised. Our interloper makes his advance. My male and I lure him toward the pit—he falls. Now we have the newcomer at a severe disadvantage. He may have been injured from his fall. He’s psychologically jarred. He may be large and physically strong, but time in the pit will change him. Any food and water he carries will soon run out. Dehydration, hunger, exposure and the mental torment of fear and isolation will break him down. The taunts and jeers of a woman who has conquered him will be especially trying. What’s more, I now have the advantage of being able to sound him out without physical reprisal. Does he have a deeper courage and mental discipline—or was his threat based on mere bulk? What are his softest spots? How can I possess him so as to reconfigure his will around mine?”
“What do you do when you’ve broken him down?” I asked at last, astonished again at what I was hearing, breaking through yet another barrier of disbelief.
“Oh, Sunny,” she smiled, with a corrosion resistant expression. “Once he’s broken, he’s rebuilt. Healed—and made whole. His trapper and tormentor becomes his savior. What might’ve been the end of his life is the beginning of a new life—with a new purpose. To serve me and to be sustained in me. He becomes the basis of my army, a stud in my stable. Once I’m absolutely sure he’s ready, I retrieve him from the pit and hitch him to my dogsled.”
“You treat him—like a dog?” I huffed, and I suddenly heard in my head the howl of timberwolves through subarctic pines.
“Of course,” she nodded. “Aren’t working dogs treated with fondness and care? Wild males long to chase and broken males love to pull in harness. Do you know the best way to run a sled dog team? You put the alpha dog in second position and run the beta as lead. The beta dog will drive harder with the true pack leader directly behind, and the alpha will push the beta dog relentlessly. Then, when the beta is spent, you still have the alpha dog, who will haul all the harder even though exhausted. That’s because the alpha isn’t elected captain. He is captain.”
“You’d be a bust-hump football coach,” I remarked.
“Yes, I was,” she replied with a poker face. “I told you I’ve been many things in my life. Once a teacher in Ohio—a small, coal miners’ high school. When the male coach was killed in a car accident—I had to take over or there wouldn’t have been a season. There were eyebrows raised of course—but I delivered. Every player on that team practiced equally hard—and everyone played in every game. Win or lose, I made those boys feel like men—because that’s what a real female can do.”
“Behind every great man is a great woman?”
“Inside every great man is a great woman,” she retorted. “And vice versa. When the prostitute or the lone female thinks like a soldier—and the soldier or the lone male recognizes himself as a prostitute and finds some of those skills within, that’s when civilization begins.”
“Geez, and I thought it was when someone laid down some laws,” I quipped.
“What I’ve been talking about is a law—the deep law,” she replied. “And now it’s time to start the next level of your training, Sunny. I know you long for the fullness of intimacy with me, but that must wait until your next visit. Nevertheless, you’re about to witness and engage in some very hot, wet sex.”
I swallowed hard as Sophia entered the room dressed in a spicy little suit that reminded me of an organ grinder’s monkey. All I wanted was what Genevieve promised. If it couldn’t be with her—this time—and that promise thrilled me—then Sophia would do nicely. I was itching for action. All the worries and wondering had been banished. Temporarily.
The young girl took my hand and led me two doors down the hall, although it seemed much farther. What a difference a door made in 4 Eyrie Street. I tried to keep my mind blank and open. Which was a good thing, because when the door swung in, we entered a room that was set out in a way I would never in a million years have predicted—and yet which was absolutely familiar.
It was a police station interview room. A large steel-legged table with a laminated top dominated the space—with but a single businesslike chair instead of the usual three or four. The chair faced a foil silver mirror, which I knew was really a window, and that Genevieve was almost assuredly watching from the other side. On the table was a heavy white telephone and in the corners of the room beneath the mirror were two black speakers. Other than these items, it was like so many rooms where I’d detained and deposed suspects over the years. There was a gray absence of sympathy and natural light to every square inch, and even the back of the white enamel door had been fitted with metal plating and a slotted window with the illusion of a view into a dead gray municipal hallway that wasn’t there.
“I’ll come back when you’ve seen what this room has to show you,” Sophia whispered, handing me a folder and closing the door behind her with a steely click.
I was certain I was being observed. I pulled out the chair and sat down at the table.
The folder looked like the usual police case file, except that on the cover was a white cartoon goose wearing a sun bonnet, like something out of a children’s story. Inside was a dossier of photos that contained anything but child-approved viewing. They were glossy black and white 35 millimeter photographs of people having sex—the kind of shots a PI would take working a divorce or blackmail angle, s
omeone trying to sabotage a politician, or the paparazzi sticking it up a celebrity. It took me a few seconds to get past the grain and texture. When I did, I couldn’t believe it.
The first batch, paper-clipped together, were of my first wife Joan. In the one on top, she was on top—in the bedroom of our first apartment. I couldn’t see who the man was. In the next one I could. It was Warwick Bunting, who’d lived just above us. The next photo showed her getting it from behind. Then we’d moved apartments and she was up on the counter with some repairman. I could almost make out the logo on his shirt. Another one looked like it was taken in the room where people lay their coats at a party. Steven Lumley was checking her oil. My hands shook. There was something impossible about the images—they all came from years ago for starters, and I recalled my earlier fear. Some had been taken with a telephoto lens, but the angles and the detail in other shots couldn’t have been achieved unless the photographer had been right in the room beside them. They had to be fakes—and that helped me cope with what they showed. Still, I couldn’t get past the fact that I recognized some of the men in them—and Joan in all. I knew this was just another mind game of Genevieve’s, but the images got to me.
The second clip file contained shots of Polly, and those frankly floored me. There was a period when she’d gone back to church. I thought it was a good thing. One of the photographs showed her on a picnic blanket with this guy Stewart who sang in the choir with her. They were kissing like teenagers with a plate of fried chicken and potato salad beside them. Then …
No back door deliveries, huh, Polly?
Another showed her polishing the knob of Hagen Kelty, an earlier police partner of mine in the front seat of a car. But the pics that really got me were a group where the man’s face was never clear. I have a feeling she didn’t care much about his face though. I threw down the folder and watched all the black and white body parts spill across the table.
The phone rang. I answered it on the fourth ring—tempted to rip it out of the wall.
“An interesting new perspective, yes, Sunny? Interesting from several angles.”
“They’re forgeries!” I yelled into the phone.
“You’ve worked with a lot of evidence over the years. You’d have to say they look authentic, wouldn’t you? What’s more, now that you’ve gotten used to them—they feel true, don’t they? To your intuition.”
“I don’t know how you did it, but these can’t be real,” I insisted.
“Real. Illusion. You’re obsessed with that distinction, Sunny. Don’t you know women are trained in illusion and camouflage almost from birth? Make up. Fashion. Diets. Beauty tips. Perfume. Douches. Lingerie. High heels. Mascara. Lipstick. Nail polish. Surgery. Lubricants. Birth control! It’s war paint and the honey trap, love. The prostitute finding her inner soldier. You want a woman to be an actress—not an actor, of course! Yet, you cry for reality. Then you see the reality. How would you describe that nearest shot of Polly?”
“You’re enjoying this,” I said. “But it isn’t her.”
“Ah, so it’s pride then. You can’t believe that what’s good for the gander is good for the goose—which comes from an earlier proverb—about what’s sauce for the goose. There’s a lot of sauce in those photos.”
“What’s your point?” I asked. “I’m a cuckold many times over? More humiliation?”
“No, Sunny,” the warm voice at the other end of the phone replied—like a smooth consultant. “After the initial shock wears off you’ll see there’s a very different message in these photos. You’ve always believed that you were the one playing up—your male pride. But you’ve also always felt guilty, like you were doing your women wrong. Even if you can’t accept that some of the photos before you are real, you can’t deny all of them. It may be that your indiscretions sometimes inspired your wives—but look at your first wife, Joan. Who didn’t she take to bed? Or on a table—or the deck of some neighbor’s house? If you concede the authenticity of even one of these photos, you see your life in a new light.”
“I’m not feeling better,” I said.
“I understand that,” her voice said. I worshipped her voice. Even in torment.
“Look at the shots of your second wife Polly, and that one particular partner. You know the one I mean.”
I picked up one of the photos in that series, titillated and repulsed all at once. Polly’s belly was big—the other shots hadn’t been from the right angle to see it.
“Turn it over. You’ll see the photos are dated.”
My stomach turned.
“Say it out loud. Into the phone—so that you can hear yourself.”
“This is just about the time of the miscarriage,” I mumbled into the receiver, but it sounded so much louder in my head.
“Imagine the effect of vigorous sex with a man like that on a pregnant woman. Have you ever considered that maybe Polly may have played some role in her own miscarriage? She was carrying the baby. She was supposedly the nurturing environment. She doesn’t look too nurturing in those photos does she? Or maybe she does—in a different way.”
“No,” I sighed. “She just looks … human. I’m still the one who drove her … to that.”
“Oh, Sunny,” the voice bounced. “You don’t even know if it was your baby! You’re the most loyal traitor I’ve met in recent memory.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Yesterday’s innocence, like guilt, is tomorrow’s despair, Sunny. I grow more hopeful for you all the time. Which is why I must make you suffer more now.”
“Great. A kick to the groin perhaps?”
“No doubt,” the voice said softly. “Life is always a kick to the mind, the heart, the loins—these are just metaphors for our deeper being.”
The lights went dim and the phone line went dead. I hung up the receiver and watched as curtains of organic patterns began to insinuate themselves across the walls like the silhouettes of vines and creepers. A jungle soundtrack rose, but not from the speakers. Raucous cries of distant birds … frogs … howler monkeys … and far away, but getting progressively louder, an infectious drum beat.
The mirrored rectangle before me changed aspect. The fog of my reflection cleared into a window or a television screen—it was hard to say which, because the image seemed to be both immediately on the other side of the glass and also very remote—as in another time and place.
It was a seedy hourly rate motel room, presented in such detail, I knew exactly what the bedspread smelled like. The linen would have a harsh industrial laundry odor, an attempt to reassure patrons of some attempt at cleanliness (which ironically would serve to remind them that other bodies had been in that same room but an hour or two before). The bedspread, however, would only get cleaned every so often, and so would’ve absorbed a flood of colognes and perfumes, sweat, mucous—all the evidence that we leave behind in illicit circumstances. Only when there’s a kind of crime do we think of evidence.
Genevieve entered the room—but as a redhead, like my first wife Joan—dressed in a bargain rack pistachio green cocktail dress. She was followed by Mutza, laid and sprayed like a Wetworld pimp with plenty of bling. The pulse of the drum beat increased in intensity.
I knew the instant they appeared what would happen, but the experience of actually seeing them together in that setting was something else entirely. She was going to make me watch her having sex with another man—and not just any man. It was cheap and stereotyped and yet it had the primal hypnotic quality of some essential conflict and release. They seemed to undress in syncopation with the rising urgency of the percussion—the heartbeat of the primeval jungle in an adulterous motel room.
I knew he would be large—the theater of the scene required it. But that doesn’t begin to convey what I saw. He’d had it strapped to his leg with a leather thong and at first it appeared just to hang, reaching down to the floor. But with her caresses it came alive, thickening to match its extraordinary length—becoming a creature unto itself. The drum pressure ros
e as Genevieve stroked and cavorted with the organ, as much as with the man. And then the speakers in my room crackled.
Both she and Mutza wore electronic collars. But unlike the one I’d worn earlier, these were voice synthesizers and they distorted the input in very contradictory ways. Genevieve’s voice had the deep, forbidding quality of something out of The Exorcist. While the obsessively endowed black sex lord spoke like a canary in some Warner Brothers’ cartoon.
I’d never in my life seen anything as rough or mesmerizing. And then to hear the distorted voices … the layers and levels of meaning. I don’t need to tell you all the details—how thoroughly he possessed her—although it seemed more like she was acquiring him.
Take the most extreme scenario of a black man and a white woman and magnify that in your mind … and you still wouldn’t begin to understand what I saw.
The moment I had my pants pulled down, the light in the motel room flickered like the end of an old film reel. The drumming stopped and suddenly there was Genevieve looking like Ava Gardner in Mogambo. Mutza stood beside her wearing a zebra skin suit and a black derby. They took a deep bow and the viewing window went dark.
Sophia came back into the room dressed in only a black tricot chemise and g-string. There was another door in the interview room that I hadn’t noticed before. She helped me out of my pants.
The room she brought me to was empty-white except for one distinctive piece of furniture—a giant version of a Dilley’s Chocolate box in the Valentine shape of a heart. Standing beside it, to my abhorrence, was the kid with the Gandhi tattoo. He was dressed in an old-fashioned blue and white Navy suit like the Cracker Jacks sailor. He gave me a smile that made me want to flatten his face. Then he opened the lid of the huge box. Sophia took my hand.
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