He cradled his bleeding hand and eyed her coldly.
“I’d thought that you were doing well. I see now I was wrong. I must be stricter with you.”
He left her then, still tied, and came back brandishing a lit candle. At the first touch of the flame against her flesh, her courage failed her. She began to beg and weep, but Gerard was implacable. He moved the candle up and down her body, its shadow dancing across her flesh. Rarely did he let the fire make contact, but when he did, the agony elicited a howl. He singed a spot below her nipple, touched the flame to her thigh and the tender spot at the base of her spine, while she thrashed against her bindings.
“Tell me how much you like this! Tell me!”
The flame blazed in her face and burned her eyes. It filled her head with an unnatural light that grew brighter and brighter before exploding into darkness.
She dreamed she was a young child, ill with the fever that had swept through her village one winter, killing half a dozen babies and a few of the older children. Her mother had held her and sung her lullabies that had been handed down for centuries.
She had not got better right away. Instead, the fever had buoyed her along like a flooding stream, sweeping her far into the depths and byways and canyons of her mind, but, for the first time in her life, she had felt loved and safe, unafraid of the death the sickness seemed to be carrying her toward.
She opened her eyes.
He had cut her down from the beam and laid her on the bed. When she moved, the pain from her burns flared, making her gasp.
“Lie still,” he told her.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Shhh.”
He slid into the bed with her and spooned himself around her. His naked flesh was warm and comforting. When he cupped one hand around her breast and slid the other up between her legs, her sigh was both of pleasure and of resignation. His mouth roved over the back of her neck, his breath disturbed the tendrils of hair along her cheekbone, his tongue probed the delicate convolutions of her ear.
She turned and sobbed against his chest. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “The things I do may seem a strange way to win your love, but don’t forget I marched with the Brethren of the Cross. I know the sorcery that pain and then the absence of pain can work upon the mind. I know that pain can penetrate a heart that can’t be opened any other way.”
He held her and she clung to him and sobbed harder.
Knowing how desperately she wanted closeness, comforting, appalled at the price she was willing to pay for it.
She had escaped the plague, thought Gabrielle, in order to endure something worse – the ever-increasing torments Gerard devised for her.
Sometimes it was merely being bound in humiliating positions and left alone to wonder when or if he would return. Sometimes it was being spanked until her buttocks burned as if she’d sat upon hot coals, or having the wax from a lit candle dripped onto her breasts and thighs.
When he wasn’t using her, Gerard kept her bound much of the time and never let her move about freely without his supervision.
But sometimes, usually when the punishments had been most brutal, he would make love to her as though she were his heart’s desire – indeed he swore she was exactly that – soothing her bruised flesh with tender caresses, moistening her sore and swollen places with his tongue. And this she found almost more difficult to tolerate than the punishment, for she both longed for his sweet comforting and despised herself for craving it.
It was after just such a time, when Gerard had followed up his punishments by making love to her slowly and in silence, each move deliberate and delicate, as if they were underwater, that he fell asleep without remembering to tie her.
Gerard was snoring deeply, and from outside came the snarling and yapping of feral dogs, but the only sound that Gabrielle heard was her own heart racing at the possibility of escape. Nothing else mattered.
Outside the night felt vast and unforgiving, stars pulsing coldly overhead. She picked up a stick to ward off wild animals and started across a field towards a stand of trees, thinking to hide there until the sun rose.
She had gone only a short distance, though, when the sky sank so low it pressed against her head and the earth seemed to undulate and roll beneath her feet. The shadows of trees became the outlines of marauders come to ravish her and kill her. The sighing of the wind became the hiss of air leaking out of bloated corpses that she, unable to see, might tread on in the dark.
Never had she felt so vulnerable and desperate for solace. The memory of Gerard’s cruelties dissipated like fog. All she could think of was the softness of his kisses, the skilful pleasuring of his hands when he rewarded her endurance with some small kindness.
Near panic, she returned to the house, only to find Gerard waiting for her, brandishing a whip of the type used by the Flagellants.
“Ungrateful whore, is this how you show your love for me?” he said, but something in his voice made her believe it had all been a trick, that he had given her the chance to escape on purpose, either to test her or to seek an excuse for greater punishment.
How confident he’d been, if that were the case, she thought. How sure that she’d return.
No amount of begging could persuade him to forego the whip. He bound her wrists above her head and brought it down across her shoulders.
The pain devoured her, obliterating everything.
“Do you want more of this? Tell me you want more!”
“Yes!”
“Do you love me? Tell me how much you love me!”
“Yes, I love you, yes!”
The agony was terrible and breathtaking – it ripped the air out of her lungs and seared her flesh as though she were a witch burning at a pyre.
When it ended, her mind seemed to stop, to fog over with a pale, cool cloud of blissful nothingness.
Oh God, she thought, the pain has stopped. Oh God, oh God, oh GodohGodohGod . . .
Gerard pressed his mouth against her ear. “I’m here,” he said. “Don’t worry. Only a few more blows. I’ll help you get through it.”
Then the chorus of pain began again, the song of the whip mingling with that of her screams, carrying her down and down into a place beyond thought, beyond fear. Without dying, she had somehow ceased to exist. Her flesh did not belong to her, nor did her name – how could it when she no longer was – nor her past nor any thought at all. There was no room for name or past or thought in the brilliant, all-consuming clarity of her agony.
The god she called out to was no longer the God of the priests and penitents, but her private god – Gerard, who gave and took away her suffering.
“There, now, it’s all right. It’s over now. It’s over.”
He untied her. She pressed her face against his chest and sobbed with gratitude. He had caused the pain to stop. He was her saviour, her protector, how had she ever doubted him? When he began to kiss her, she kissed him back, then slid down his body, kissing every inch of him, anointing his skin with her tongue.
“I love you,” she said. Then, when he gave no reply, she added, “Now you must love me, too.”
To prove her devotion, Gabrielle worked diligently to please him. In bed, she acquiesced to every demand, and pleaded for new punishments. She prepared meals from whatever meagre food was available, combing the orchards around the house for fruits, making salads of wild grasses. In the fields she picked the pale purple-blue flowers that her mother had so often pointed out to her, gathering the luscious-looking berries in her skirt.
In performing these small domestic tasks, it seemed to Gabrielle that, indeed, she felt real love for him, even as she made a salad of wildflowers and grasses and crushed the purple berries to make a pie.
In the night, Gabrielle woke to hear Gerard arguing loudly with someone. Alarmed, she lit a candle. No one was there. Her lover was sitting up in bed, conversing with great animation. The pupils of his eyes were dilated; his skin felt hot and dry. For an instant, she fancied she cou
ld hear the distant drumming of the Flagellants, then realized it was his heartbeat, audible at several feet.
“Harder, I can’t feel it!” he was shouting. “Harder! You must flog me harder!”
This went on for some time, before he fell into an exhausted, feverish sleep.
The hallucinations grew worse. Gerard imagined he saw whips descending and fires blazing at his feet. He cried out and flailed away at imaginary tormenters. So violent became his behaviour that she was forced to tie him to the bed with the same ropes that he had used to bind her.
He complained his mouth was dry and that he couldn’t swallow, so she brought him water and put cool compresses across his brow. When she held and stroked his hand, she could feel his wildly beating pulse.
During a lucid phase, he said, “You could run away now. Why don’t you?”
“You need me,” she said, delicately licking the sweat from along his temple. “You wanted me to love you, and I do. If I can’t take away your pain, at least I can help you bear it.”
The days dragged on. Gerard was able to eat only a few spoonfuls of food, and his illness worsened. No spots disfigured his skin, no boils erupted along his groin, but still he grew ever weaker.
Gabrielle nursed him, fed him, kept him clean. At night she spooned herself around his back and stroked his chest and stomach, kissed his neck and outlined with her tongue the geography of scars that mapped his back.
When she had to leave him, if only for a moment, he would call out for her in fear.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” he said. “I saw the emptiness in your eyes and wanted you to feel something. I wanted you to need me. To love me.”
“I do love you,” said Gabrielle.
He squeezed her hand. “I thought that I was different, that somehow I’d escape the plague when everyone else was dying of it. I don’t know why, but I didn’t think I’d die of plague.”
“Nothing else I can promise you,” she said, stroking his face, “but this I do. You will not die of plague.”
Perhaps he even believed her, for he clutched her hand more tightly and kissed her fingers with desperation and desire.
He died later that night, holding tightly to her hand, voicing his undying love for her, even as his heartbeat grew so loud that the pounding filled the room. She had no energy for digging a grave, but dragged his body outside and left it for the dogs.
Some passers-by, headed east from Pisa, told her the plague still raged around her village, but Gabrielle no longer feared it. She had decided to return home to her father. She prayed he hadn’t died. If he was only ill, then she would nurse him. If he was healthy still, then she would win his love the way she had Gerard’s. She would crush more of the purple berries, the lovely, deadly nightbane berries that her mother’d always warned her of, and bake them in a pie. As with Gerard, she would feed him only small amounts, enough to provide a lingering and painful death, enough to give him time to well appreciate how lovingly she cared for him, how desperately he needed her, how exquisitely soothing was her touch.
She fantasized it as she began the journey home. How she would hold her father, stroke his brow, comfort him through his agony. How, at the end, he would pull her close and clutch her hand and tell her that he loved her.
Night Moves
Michael Perkins
“Swing: to shift or fluctuate from one condition, form, position, or object of attention or favour to another.”
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
Midnight in the Garden
Bruise on her breast,
not my fingertips,
Gloss on her lips,
not licked from me.
Hair a tangled halo
I hadn’t mussed,
Eyes swollen and wanton,
not turned my way,
Her smell of lust
stronger than
sharpest memory;
I could not swallow,
I could barely see.
This was what it meant:
This was being free.
Part One
East Hampton, 1976
ONE
Mora and I had been in East Hampton for two days waiting for the sun to come out when we ran into Charles and Vy. It was July, the Bicentennial Summer, and we were on our first vacation as man and wife. We’d accepted a friend’s invitation to spend a few days at his beach house, but the afternoon we arrived the rains came, and lasted through the following day. We were grumpy stuck inside. We wanted to lie naked in the sun.
The next morning, the sun made its appearance, and it was windy when we walked to the beach. We had the ocean to ourselves, but it was too rough to go in. Empty blue sky, empty white beach, empty green ocean. The freckled, lively children further down the beach who were our only neighbours had to be content with building sandcastles. Mora read a novel and wrote in her journal, frowning and chewing her lip. It was her way of arguing with me without saying anything, and also of arguing with herself instead of with me. I shrugged at her silence and went for a long run on the wet hard sand, where high rolling breakers left thick clumps of seaweed, but I couldn’t outrace my frustration.
By evening, we were speaking only when spoken to and being scrupulously polite with each other. We brooded in marital silence over cold gin at Peaches, a restaurant in Bridgehampton where summer people went that year for a hamburger or a salad before rushing off to the parties that seemed to run around the clock, summer weekends on the South Fork. When there was a breeze from the ocean, the leaves of the giant maples on the sidewalk outside scratched softly at the window screens. On each small round table a slender mirrored vase held a single rose. It should have been romantic; couples all around us thought it was.
I reached for her hand and she put it quickly in her lap.
“What the hell is wrong with us?”
She sighed and I knew she was grateful that I’d spoken first. The answer was sitting on her tongue. “It’s marriage. Holy wedlock.”
“You want to expand on that?”
“I don’t have to. We both know it’s that – why it’s that.”
So we did. Jealousy. Possessiveness. Insecurity. Fights, screaming, threats, feeling trapped. And keeping score – that was the worst. That computerized reference file constantly added to of insult and injury, a never-to-be-erased tape of gritty misery.
“OK. What do we do now? Throw in the towel because the honeymoon isn’t working out?”
“I don’t know, Richard. I just think being unhappy is a waste of time.”
“Agreed.”
We stared at each other. Neither of us really wanted to be married. Not really. We were romantics, we weren’t interested in snug harbours – when we spoke of love, we meant passion. Rub us together and you got fire.
From the time I first saw Mora I was under a spell. I know some magic was involved, because I was on the defensive after the break-up of a relationship I’d taken more seriously than I should have. The home truths I’d learned about my needs were so lacerating, I vowed eternal celibacy.
For six months I’d been living like a monk in a basement sublet in Brooklyn Heights. It had a single bed I used and a kitchen I didn’t, and little else except for a colour television set and a well-equipped darkroom. No pictures on the walls, no plants to be watered, no cats to wrap themselves around my ankles when I came back late from my studio on West 17th Street.
It was a low, unhappy period in my life. I told myself I’d snap out of my funk any day, but the truth was I was drifting, getting by in a low key. I had let being in love become a way of defining myself. Alone, I didn’t know who I was.
Mora came along just when I was beginning to spend so much time in Village bars that the bartenders knew my name, occupation, and marital status. One of them was an actor I had used as a model. He knew a woman who needed some pictures.
“She comes in here all the time. Lives just around the block. She’s real intense.”
“You don’t
understand. I take pictures of products, not egos. I don’t do portfolio glossies and I don’t want to meet any women.”
It was noisy in the bar, right before dinner. Maybe he didn’t hear me.
“She’s a lot of fun. Just let me tell her you’ll do it.”
A few days later she showed up at my studio. I was fussing with lights around an ornate, old-fashioned bathtub with claw feet. Later in the day, the agency that had had it delivered to me would come to fill it with towels – I did catalogues, too.
I earn a living with a 35 millimetre camera because when I was a boy I picked up a Brownie for the first time and discovered my third eye. I have a gift for seeing with the camera lens what the naked eye misses, moments when formlessness becomes form. When Mora walked through the door, it was one of those moments.
I stared. She stared back. She was so small I could have fitted her in a large camera bag. The top of her head came to the middle of my chest. Her curly hair was short but not mannishly cut, a chestnut brown that smelled like oranges.
Her white skirt showed off her slender legs, and she had thrown a linen jacket over her thin shoulders. She wore a figa – a small, fist-shaped Brazilian good luck charm – on a gold chain around her throat, but no earrings, no bracelets: only a trace of lip gloss. Her tan was so deep, she looked like she’d just stepped off a plane from someplace south.
I looked away first, after seeing the mischief in her calm green eyes. “Ever modelled before?”
She shook her head. “Only for my boyfriend’s Polaroid, but the pictures always came out blurry – you know how those things go. He found it hard to concentrate.” She suppressed a smirk.
“You don’t say.”
We were grinning at each other. Hers was impish, provocative. “Have you acted before?”
“Never, if you don’t count Gilbert and Sullivan in grade school. But I’ve tried everything else and all my friends are in theatre this year, so I thought, why not?”
Her self-confidence was dazzling. It came out in the standard portrait shots I did of her. Her dark features were wonderfully mobile, and she kept that glint in her eye. After the shooting, I cancelled my appointment with the bath towel people and took Mora to dinner.
The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 22