And the magnificent irony was, nobody noticed.
We received not a single phone call or letter of protest. One of the city councilmen, by God, stopped me on the street the day it ran and actually congratulated me on a “hard-hitting and thought-provoking article.” If I’d been drunk at the time I would have laughed in his face. Riotously.
The humor struck me again now, and a sound burst from my larynx that had a tonal quality similar to the famous baying outside Baskerville Hall. Storm swiveled her head toward me. Others, too, including Mike and the Hulk, but I had eyes only for Storm.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s funny.”
“Poor Doug,” she said, and immediately resumed her optical foreplay with the brute.
I swallowed the dregs from my glass, ate the olive, fired up another cancer stick, and got quietly off the stool and wove my way to the can. Where I took a leak and, of course, managed to dribble on myself before I got the shriveled-up, uncooperative old soldier safely tucked away again inside his Fruit of the Loom bunker. When I turned on the sink tap, water splashed up out of the bowl and wet my shirtfront. Naturally.
“You’re pathetic, Kent,” somebody said.
I looked up. In the mirror a bleary-eyed, smoke-haloed gent was giving me the eye. Looked just like me, poor bugger, poor Doug. I winked at him; he winked right back.
“A cliché,” he said, “that’s what you are. The cynical, drunken newspaperman. A bloody cliché.”
“Right,” I said. “Absolutely right.”
“You were born a cliche,” the face said. “From the moment you popped out of the old lady with the umbilical cord wrapped around your scrawny neck and your wizened little puss blue from cyanosis, you were doomed to lead the kind of miserable life you’ve led. A cliche using a series of cliches to grow into an even bigger cliche, and never once rising above the sum of your parts. You’re a self-fulfilled prophecy, Kent, that’s what you are.”
“You bet,” I said. “Fucking A.”
“That’s why you ended up here—in Pomo, in Gunderson’s, in this smelly crapper talking to your fuzzy, cliched image in the mirror. You couldn’t have ended up anywhere else. You’ll sink lower, too, and when you finally die it will be in the most cliched way possible. You pathetic schmuck, you.”
Squinting, I saluted the son of a bitch. Squinting, the son of a bitch saluted me.
I wove back out to the bar. Storm, as expected, had moved in on the strange beast; she was sitting on the stool next to him, her head close to his, her hand already on his thigh. Kent, I thought, you ought to be a weather forecaster. You can predict a Storm with the best of ’em.
I kept on weaving to the door. Nobody noticed, of course. Nobody paid the slightest attention as the crusading editor, the self-pitying gutter philosopher, the cliche supreme stumbled out into the night in search of more salve and another stick for his heavy, heavy bag.
Storm Carey
THE HUNGER WANTED so badly to fuck him, this new one in town. He’d been on the edge of my mind since the bank, and when he walked into the lounge I thought it must be fated for the Hunger to get its wish. It thought so, too. Its demands were immediate. As I watched the stranger hunched over the bar sipping his beer, the demands grew feverish. Never satisfied, wanting more, wanting new, wanting … what? What else besides what I kept feeding it?
Almost from my first awareness of the Hunger, two months after Neal’s fatal coronary, I thought of it as a mouth, a thick-lipped, nibbling mouth deep within my body. Shrunken at first, the nibbles tiny, then expanding as its need grew, opening wider, nibbling more insistently, probing with something like a tongue as it moved down through my chest, hardening my nipples, down, tightening my stomach and groin, down, fiery breath making me wet, fiery tongue licking …
Cunnilingus from within. That was the sensation and that was how I described it to the shrink I visited for a while in San Francisco. She was very interested in the concept; what woman wouldn’t be? Her interpretation was that the Hunger was grief-born, grief-sustained. Neal and I had been deeply, passionately in love, had enjoyed fabulous sex together throughout our marriage; his sudden death not only left an enormous gap in my life, but in my sex life as well, and so psychologically I had created the Hunger in an effort to fill the emptiness for brief periods. All the men were substitutes, surrogates: Through them I was trying to resurrect both Neal and the powerful physical intimacy we’d shared. But, of course, that was impossible, which was why the sex with them was never satisfying (and why it left me feeling cheap and disgusted with myself), why the Hunger renewed its hot, nibbling demands again so soon afterward.
All well and good—a reasonable analysis as far as it went. But the Hunger was more than just sexual need, more than a yearning for Neal and what we’d had for nine years, more than a gap filler and a psychological desire for love and intense human connection. The Hunger was something dark, too, hidden behind the mouth’s thick lips and searching tongue. Something I couldn’t reach or understand, and until I did, something I couldn’t hope to satisfy. The Hunger’s purely sexual demands frightened me, but not half so much as its unknown dark part. I tried to explain this to the shrink, and she seemed sympathetic, but her opinion was that it was, in fact, sexual: the so-called dark side of sex, childhood fears, religious and societal taboos, all that. When she kept trying to convince me of this, I ended our sessions. She was wrong; whatever the dark element was, it was not sexually related. And not she nor anyone else could help me find out what it really was. I was the only one who could do that, and someday I would.
But not tonight. Tonight the Hunger was all sex, raging sex, with no hint of anything else.
I couldn’t sit still any longer. When Doug Kent got up and lurched away to the men’s room, it was like a release. I slid off the stool, smoothed the tight skirt down over my hips. It was an effort not to seem too eager as I walked over and sat next to the Hunger’s new target.
He knew I was there—he couldn’t help knowing—but he neither moved nor looked at me until I said, “Don’t you like my scent?” His sideways glance then was without apparent interest, and there was no change in his expression even after he’d examined my face and the hollow between my breasts. Not even the faintest spark of lust that usually flares in men’s eyes. His were so pale in the dim light that the irises blended into the whites, to the point of invisibility; it was like meeting the gaze of a blind man. They gave me a small frisson.
“It’s very expensive,” I said.
“What is?”
“My perfume. It’s called Paris Nights.”
“Your husband give it to you?”
“I don’t have a husband.”
“Boyfriend, then.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Guy you’re with’s a relative, is that it?”
“No. A casual acquaintance. You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t remember what it was.”
“I asked if you liked my scent.”
“Perfume’s okay. It’s the other one I don’t like.”
“Other one?”
“Gin. Smell of gin on a woman’s breath turns me off.”
“I have a bottle of Listerine in my bathroom.”
“I’d still smell the gin.”
“There are other ways to keep that from happening.”
“Direct as hell, aren’t you?”
“Yes. When I see something I want.”
“Something. Uh-huh.”
“I meant someone.”
“Sure you did. Do I look like a necrophiliac?”
“… Now, what is that supposed to mean?”
“I like my women active, not passed out.”
“I won’t pass out. I haven’t had that much to drink.”
“Your eyes and your voice say different.”
I put my hand on his thigh, stroked it gently. “I promise to be alert and very active.”
“Give it up, lady.” He pushed my hand away.
“Oh, now. You’re not even a little interested?”
“Not even a little.”
“Why not? Don’t you find me attractive?”
“Too attractive.”
“Another cryptic statement. This one meaning?”
“Why me? I’m no prize.”
“I find big men exciting.”
“Big men with run-over faces. Yeah.”
“I like your face.” I didn’t, though; it was ugly. But the Hunger didn’t care. His ugliness, the animal power he projected, only made the Hunger want him more.
He tilted the bottle to his mouth. It seemed dwarfed in the circle of his thick-furred fingers. “Slumming,” he said then.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Rich bitch out slumming.”
“If you’re trying to insult me …”
“Trying? I’ve been doing it ever since you sat down.”
“I’m not slumming,” I said. “And I’m not exactly rich.”
“What about the bitch part?”
“Have it your way.”
“Paris Nights perfume, expensive clothes, expensive hairdo …. you’ve got money, all right. I know your type.”
“Not as well as you think you do.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“My name is Storm. What’s yours?”
“Storm. Yeah, right.”
“I was born during one, and my parents had a fanciful streak. Would you like to see my driver’s license?”
“No. I don’t want to see anything of yours.”
“Now who’s being direct? You didn’t tell me your name.”
“No, and I’m not going to.” This time, when he tilted the bottle, he took a long, deep swallow. His throat and the line of his neck and jaw were massive; they made me think of a grizzly bear I once saw at the San Francisco zoo. “I’ve had about enough of this game.”
“I’m not playing a game,” I said. “Would you like to leave now?”
“Not with you.”
“You won’t be sorry if you do.”
“Sure I would. So would you. You wouldn’t like it with me and I wouldn’t like it with you and we’d both hate ourselves afterward.”
“You’re wrong. I’d enjoy it with you very much. And I guarantee you’d enjoy it with me. It won’t take long to find out. My house is only about three miles from here.”
“Your house. Uh-huh. You live alone?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re willing to take me there, a complete stranger—just like that. No worries I might tie you up and steal the silverware? Or cut you up into little pieces, maybe?”
I felt another frisson. “I don’t believe you’re that kind of man.”
“But you don’t know that I’m not, do you?”
“Are you trying to frighten me?”
“No, lady,” he said slowly and distinctly, as if he were attempting to reason with a child, “I’m trying to get rid of you.” He put the bottle down and swung away from me, onto his feet. “Good night and happy hunting.”
“Wait …”
He didn’t wait. He went away into the dark.
I nearly chased after him. But it wouldn’t have done any good and I didn’t care to make a public scene; I have very little pride left, but there is just enough to dictate a certain decorum. Neal taught me so many things; a sense of propriety was one of them.
I took a moment to compose myself and then returned to my original seat. Mike Gunderson smirked at me dourly as I sat down. He’d been watching the stranger and me, but at a discreet distance; eavesdropping wasn’t one of his faults. He had been a friend of Neal’s and he neither liked the widow nor approved of her behavior. One of many Storm-haters in Pomo, not that I or the Hunger cared. If he hadn’t had an inordinate fondness for the almighty dollar he would have declared me persona non grata long ago.
“No luck tonight, Mrs. Carey?” he said. He refused any longer to call me by my first name. “Too bad.”
“I’ll have another martini, please.”
“Yes, ma’am. I guess you need it.”
For the first time I noticed that Doug was still absent, his place at the bar cleared away. “Did Mr. Kent leave?”
“While you were having your … conversation.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No. He just left.”
Poor Doug. I liked him, I truly did, and I felt sorry for him. Not a day or night goes by now that I don’t despise myself, but my self-loathing is nothing compared to his. His is long-nurtured and has to do with weakness and failure—part of the reason he wants me so desperately, because he knows he can’t have me and the knowledge fuels his destructive impulses. If it were up to me I’d take him to bed, but it’s not up to me. The Hunger doesn’t want him. Many men, yes, some men, no, and I’m not involved in the selection process. No mercy fucks for the Hunger. It knows exactly what it craves, and what it craved tonight was the hulking animal presence that had rejected it, me, both of us.
The demands of the mouth, lips, tongue, fire breath were still intense. Feed me, feed me … like the plant creature in Little Shop of Horrors. And I would have to feed it, and soon, or it would give me no peace through the long, long night. In my mind we opened the file of men the Hunger had chosen in the past; one of them would have to do. We flipped through the names, looking for one the Hunger considered suitable, one who could be induced to come to us on short notice. No. No. No. No. No. No.
Yes.
Mike set the fresh martini in front of me, turned away without speaking. One sip, another, a third. Then, with the Hunger prodding me, I went to the public telephone near the rest rooms and made my siren’s call.
Richard Novak
I COULDN’T SEEM to sit still tonight. No particular reason, unless it was a residue of the uneasiness the stranger in the Porsche had built in me. A combination of things piling up over a period of time. Tonight wasn’t the first that I’d felt restless, dissatisfied; too often lately my life seemed empty on the one hand, overburdened and loaded with frustrations on the other. It needed something, some kind of shift or change or sense of purpose. But I couldn’t seem to make up my mind what it could or should be.
Part of the problem was the daily grind of my job. There was little enough felony crime in Pomo, but as if to make up for that we had more than our fair share of the other kinds, particularly those that plague economically depressed rural towns with a population in the ten-thousand range—domestic violence and abuse, belligerent drunks and drunk driving, kids on drugs, adults on drugs, automobile theft, and vandalism. All of this on a continuing basis, and just me and ten full-time and four part-time male and female officers to handle it. The county sheriff’s office is supposed to provide assistance and backup, but they have their hands full elsewhere; the Southport area, which is loaded with welfare cases and homeless people, has the highest crime rate in the county. Besides, Sheriff Leo Thayer is a political hack who doesn’t know his ass from a tree stump, and more often than not we ended up at loggerheads on even petty law-enforcement issues. There was no money in the city or county treasuries for more manpower or modern equipment or new patrol cars; we had to make do with what we had, and with underpaid civilians in dispatcher and clerk and other positions that should’ve been filed by professionals. Even absolute necessities such as weapons and shortwave-radio repairs couldn’t be gotten or gotten done without a hassle. I spent too much time playing politics—Pomo’s mayor, Burton Seeley, is also top dog in the machine that runs the county—and begging favors. And on top of that I had to indulge Seeley and the city council by attending civic functions at an average of one a week in order to “maintain a high standard of community relations,” one of the top dog’s pet policies. Half the time I was in uniform I felt harried, bullied, short-tempered, and hamstrung—and wishing I’d stayed in law enforcement in Monterey County and worked my way up through the ranks toward a captain
cy, instead of jumping at the first police chief’s job that was offered to me seven years ago. If I had, maybe Eva and I—
No. Moving to Pomo hadn’t finished us. The miscarriage had done that. The miscarriage and the part of Eva I’d never been able to reach.
The women in and out of my life—that was another reason for the restlessness, the dissatisfaction. Eva. And Storm after Eva was gone. And the hollow series of brief flings and one-night stands after it ended with Storm. And now Audrey and the uncertain feelings I had for her. Once I’d been so sure of what I wanted from a woman and a relationship. Not anymore. I wasn’t sure of much of anything anymore.
Midlife crisis? Call it that, or whatever. At thirty-seven I was starting to drift, to go through the motions. If I didn’t do something about it, get down inside myself and find some direction again, I’d wind up a nonalcoholic version of Douglas Kent—a scooped-out, burned-out mass filling up time and space while he waited for the hearse to come and haul him away.
After supper I tried reading and I tried watching TV. Mack whining to go out gave me something else to do for a while. I put the leash on him and walked him down by the lake, a good, long, brisk walk even though the temperature had dropped into the forties. Mack liked the cold; it made him frisky. Big old black Lab with a sweet disposition—a better friend than any human I knew in Pomo, with the possible exception of Audrey. I’d bought him for Eva after the miscarriage, a misguided attempt to fill some of the emptiness. Instead, she’d resented him—he was alive and her baby wasn’t—and had refused to have anything to do with him. Tried to get me to give him away, and when I wouldn’t do it, because I needed Mack even if she didn’t, she withdrew even more.
Withdrawal was her way of coping. From me, from the life we’d had, from the fact that she couldn’t have any more children. When her body was healed she wouldn’t let me touch her. Couldn’t stand to have me touch her anymore, she said. She’d always been religious; she withdrew into religion. Hours spent reading the Bible, praying aloud. Two, three, four days a week away from home doing church work. Six months of this, and then one day she was gone—moved out, moved back to Monterey to live with her mother. Saved herself and left me alone to find some other way to save myself. It hurt then and it still hurt now, after four years—a dull ache that came and went, came and went. The last I’d heard, five months ago through an old family friend, she was in a religious retreat somewhere near San Luis Obispo. One of us, at least, had found an answer.
A Wasteland of Strangers Page 4