Naked Came the Stranger

by Penelope Ashe

  And then it ended.

  “All right, Mrs. Blake,” she heard him say. “You can go home now.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “I was just testing your reactions,” he said. “I think I’ve got what I wanted.”

  “You mean this—all this—was just an experiment?”

  “That’s all, Mrs. Blake,” he said. “You can go home now … if you really want to.”

  He stood before her still physically aroused, taunting her, waiting to hear her beg for him to continue. Waiting to record her pleadings for some future novel. She had an unholy desire to reach out and touch him, to hold him there, to make him plead for her. But she did nothing. She retrieved her panties from the foot of the bed and stepped into them. She found her brassiere in the living room and put it back in place. She found an overcoat in the hall closet and put it on. Caradoc watched all this in mute wonder, in a seeming state of shock.

  “Amazing!” was all he said.

  “What is truly amazing,” she said, “is your ego.”

  “Hey,” he said, “you’ll come back, won’t you? You’ll come back and visit me, won’t you?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she promised—that and no more—and then she was gone.

  She thought about it and she came back. There had never been a rationalization, a justification, a way to explain her repeated visits to the isolated house by the water’s edge. But time and time again she returned. Possibly because Caradoc became such an effective antidote for the sordid little affairs as they ended, perhaps because he was a bracing tonic for the new affairs that were about to begin. Most likely, however, because in a sense they both were scientists, experimenters seeking life’s more elusive truths. Even their interests were similar—while he explored love, she explored marriage.

  It ended only because it had to end. Caradoc drained her of time and emotion. With Caradoc she had found more than a mutuality of interests, more than sex, more than the conversation that never grew stale or repetitive. There came a time, as winter gave way to spring, that she thought, not without alarm, that it might even be love. If it was love, it would ruin everything—the show, possibly herself. If not love, there was no reason to continue. And so, one day early in June, as Zoltan Caradoc was saying that this year, for some reason, he didn’t feel like going out on one of his annual three-month hunting expeditions, Gillian calmly did what had to be done. She ended it.

  After that there was just one bit of communication. One last letter to become a treasure beyond price for literary historians tracing the career of Zoltan Caradoc. The envelope carried a postmark from Haiti.

  Dear Gilly, You have left your mark on King’s Neck. The mark of the cat. The claw-shaped scar splayed across a neighborhood of broken lives. And I, almost as well as you, know the toll (God knows you boasted about it to me often enough). The dead, the destroyed, the psychotic, the forever sad. The marriages that you snapped in two as if you were breaking straws.

  And finally, me—in a sense the beginning and the end. The mirror you saw your victories within, now shattered. I hope you have your seven years’ bad luck; it is the least I can wish you. This is my last message, my curtain call for the part you made me play. After all the writing, all the words I was creating for you, I end our communication with a properly prosaic letter. But do not wrinkle that aristocratic nose. I dare not bore you, even now.

  This letter will be like English beer, short and bitter. It must be brief because I have two ladies waiting for me in the next room. One is a pretty little blonde virgin of sixteen with a maddening resemblance to the White Rock girl. The other is a wildcat black who is a virgin only in her left ear. Sharing a bed with the two of them and exploring their reactions to the same events shall be my modest entertainment this cool summer evening. It is a curiously refreshing diversion. I call it sin and tonic.

  But hold. This letter is serious. I am writing to humble myself before you, to acknowledge in cold blood what I have only recently come to realize: That in the end it was I who was your greatest triumph—your masterpiece of creative destruction. Your master piece. (One day I shall be crucified on a cross of puns.) And did you know it all along? Did you, my sweet, cynical destroyer?

  We had our moments. We did, dear Gilly, didn’t we, in those days? At least admit that. The priestess and the poet. I knew your game. I knew all the tables were rigged for the house. But I saw no reason not to play. After all, unlike your other conquests, I had nothing to lose. There was nothing you could take from me, nothing you could separate me from, nothing you could destroy. Or so I thought. And I accepted your love for what it seemed to be. So I made you my muse—all the muse that’s fit to print, as your newspaper friends would say.

  The others didn’t matter. I saw you bowl them over like tenpins, one after another. Down they went. The muscleman, the abortionist, the gangster, the prizefighter, the poor Jewish husband, the mad pornographer—I don’t remember their names. I can’t tell the losers without a score card. Did you keep a score card, Gilly? I wouldn’t be surprised. You cut them all down, Gilly; you cut them all down with the sharp edge of your sex as if they were saplings thirsting for the ax. But not Caradoc—not the Shakespeare of Suburbia, the Messiah of the Misbegotten Generation, the Nonconformist of Time’s cover.

  I saw them come and go, saw you mark up the scores. I watched, knowing that after each one you would return for the real thing. We may not have made the earth move, Gilly, but we made my mind spin—and until now that has always been the same thing. All those times before the fireplace, the flames turning your skin to copper, your breasts to the Spanish hills below Valencia at sunset, your hollows to the textured porous shadows of shifting sand. And I had a gypsy for a muse. Making love before that fire, feeding the flames with our own fuel, lying there gazing through the skylight, reaching the stars.

  You would smoke then, and I would talk of the future. I was going to be immortal, wasn’t I? My work. What a legacy for the world. What greater gift for my fellow man? What greater dedication than to distill in words the essence of life?

  What bullshit.

  Does that shock you? Not likely. After all, bullshit is what the Billy & Gilly shows are made of. I suppose nothing could shock you, not now. Not you, dear Gilly. I suppose you planned it all. I had miscalculated, overestimated your longing for immortality. You were to be my blonde Dark Mistress, remember? Graduate students and scholars were going to pore over my works in the twenty-first century and write endless theses, complete with footnotes, on the identity of Zoltan Caradoc’s golden goddess. Only now, now that you are gone, do I realize that you are quite content to be listed in the book of life as Mrs. William Blake, the round-heeled half of Billy & Gilly. Three cheers for Salinger’s Fat Lady. Hip, hip, hurrah!

  The point is that I have not written a line, Gilly, not a word, since the day you left. I have given up the words. I relinquish them to those who still believe in them. That was your greatest triumph, Gilly, greater than any of the marriages you wrecked, or the deaths you caused, or the pain you produced.

  When I finish this letter, in a moment, I am going into the bedroom to make perverse love to my virgin and my whore. It will be recorded on film and tape, part of the research, my research. I will read the transcripts and study the pictures. But the words will not come. They do not come any more.

  I had no mate, Gilly, so you separated me from myself. It was brilliant. I don’t know how early in the game you planned it that way. But I want you to know how completely you succeeded. Macbeth hath murdered sleep but he is no match for Gilly. Dear Gilly hath murdered Art. Gilly hath murdered immortality.

  Yours, alas—

  Z.

  “THE BILLY & GILLY SHOW,” JULY 18TH

  Gilly: Well, Billy, I see we’re coming to the end of our last show, our last show before our vacation. Four glorious weeks to ourselves. Just the two of us. Then, when we come back, well … shall we tell them?

  Billy: I don’t see why not
, darling.

  Gilly: I never could keep a secret—but you knew that when you married me. We’re moving again! That’s right, the next time you hear this program, we’ll be right back where we belong, right back in a lovely new apartment here in midtown Manhattan.

  Billy: That’s right, darling. But don’t you think we owe our listeners a little explanation? It seems only yesterday—golly, I guess it was just about a year ago—that we announced we were moving out of the city and into suburbia, into our new home in King’s Neck.

  Gilly: Yes, I suppose an explanation would be germane to—oh, don’t frown, sweetheart, everyone knows that means relevant. And I suppose an explanation would be relevant here.

  Billy: As our listeners must know by now—they certainly hear it often enough—the purpose of this show is to look at marriage “in the crucible of modern living.”

  Gilly: Well put, darling.

  Billy: And what better crucible than suburbia? For us, and I hope for our listeners, it has been a valuable year, a year of experimentation, an opportunity to look at.…

  Gilly: Yes, dear, all that is true enough, but we may as well admit it hasn’t all been sweetness and light. In fact, just the other day we both seemed to notice at the same time what has been happening in King’s Neck. One marriage after another has crumbled, just gone up in smoke.…

  Billy: I think you’re mixing your metaphors, darling.…

  Gilly: Anyway, we both noticed that our neighborhood is beginning to look like a ghost town. It seems as though there’s a FOR SALE sign in front of every home.

  Billy: Not that we regret having lived in King’s Neck. It was, as I was saying a moment ago, a splendid opportunity to examine some of the forces that tend to twist and pry apart marriages. And nowhere do you see these forces as clearly as in suburbia.

  Gilly: The pressures are simply terrific. The husbands and wives of King’s Neck are, in a sense, separated. Not legally separated—but they certainly go their separate ways from morning to night. I’ve had many talks with the housewives of King’s Neck and I’ve never seen so many frustrated females in one place. There is the constant striving for material goods—new cars, new swimming pools—and somewhere along the way they seem to have lost sight of spiritual values. The effect this can have on a marriage can be simply devastating.

  Billy: I think we can count ourselves among the lucky ones.…

  Gilly: In all fairness, Billy, it isn’t just luck. To make a marriage work—and how often we’ve said this!—people have to work at it.

  Billy: I couldn’t agree with you more wholeheartedly, darling. And I think we might add something else here. The first thing a person notices about a suburb such as King’s Neck is the rootlessness. And with that, the restlessness. People all too often tend to turn their backs on tradition, tend to forget the valuable lessons that have been carefully preserved and handed down by past generations.

  Gilly: I hope you’re not going to say something as, well, basic as, “The family that prays together stays together.”…

  Billy: But maybe.…

  Gilly: Perhaps, after all, it is something basic and simple. But maybe it goes something like this: The family that stays together stays together. I realize that many of our listeners will feel that togetherness is just a little on the corny side. But I think we can say that togetherness has always been important to us.

  Billy: Indeed it has, darling. Well, I see our time is running out.…

  Gilly: Remember, our address may be a new one, but we’ll be back at this same spot in just four weeks.

  Billy: So you be thinking about us because.…

  Gilly: We’ll be thinking about you.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Original copyright © 1969 by Penelope Ashe

  Preface copyright © 2003 by Mike McGrady

  This 2012 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media

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