by JP Delaney
I enjoyed what you wrote for me, and I look forward to meeting up when I’m back. In the meantime, you may find the attached more to your taste.
<
In his second fantasy, Patrick describes how he would blindfold me and beat me with a belt.
In his third fantasy, which arrives just a few hours later, he describes me lying on a bed of freshly laundered sheets surrounded by candles, like a body laid out on an altar. “I pick up two candles, one in each hand. They’re fat and heavy, like the candles in a church. The flames are spear-points, white-hot, tipped with black smoke, the wicks surrounded by brimming disks of clear, molten wax. I hold the first one above you and tilt my hand. You flinch, but don’t cry out. The wax hardens on your skin, turning milky as it cools, like a scar.”
In his fourth fantasy, he describes me being surprised in a hotel room by a cold, mysterious stranger, who ties me to the bed before throttling me.
* * *
—
“This is good,” Dr. Latham says, reading Patrick’s latest over my shoulder. “We’re getting a lot of material here.”
“Like what, specifically?” Frank’s frowning.
“The candles, the restraints…And setting it in a hotel room—that’s a very significant overlap with Stella’s killing.”
“But nothing only the killer would know,” Frank objects. “No knife, for that matter. And a lawyer would say maybe he chose a hotel room because that’s where he was when he wrote it.”
“Give him time, Frank. On the strength of this, I can already say that Patrick Fogler has a sexual predilection shared by only a small section of the population. Let the net close slowly. It’ll be all the tighter when it does.”
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: Our meeting
Very nice, Patrick. But—I wonder—how much further can you go?
As for meeting again—well, let’s see. I’ve been let down so many times before. And once…Once, as I told you, I wasn’t let down, and that was even worse in the end.
Keep writing me, Patrick. Please.
Claire X
32
“Today,” Kathryn says, “we’re going to learn how to listen.”
“What?”
“I said, today—” She stops. “Oh. Ha ha. Funny.”
It’s been ten days since Patrick went to Europe; five since his last email. We know he’s back in Manhattan, but since asking him to keep writing, I’ve heard nothing. Kathryn’s trying to keep me busy, but I sense her heart’s not really in it, any more than mine is. We’re all of us marking time, waiting for Patrick to get back in touch.
“What I’m going to show you now,” Kathryn continues, “are some basic neurolinguistic techniques.”
She puts up a chart. It’s divided into two columns, WRONG and RIGHT.
“First, judgments. Try to refrain from making any. Saying That’s disgusting or even That’s great is less useful than a neutral response such as I see, or Go on. And remember that the most effective interrogator of all is silence.” She stops. “You’re fidgeting, Claire. Is something wrong?”
I groan. “We covered all this in week one of my acting class. Except we called it blocking and accepting.”
She frowns at me. “Claire, my training lasted seven years. I hardly think a few extra days—”
“I hardly think a few extra days—” I mimic, so exactly that Kathryn flushes.
“That reminds me,” she says frostily. “You must tell me when your periods are due. We may have to structure the operation around your less moody times.”
Wow. Even by Kathryn’s standards, that’s bitchy. Not to mention clinical. I stare at her, incredulous.
“All right,” she says, throwing up her hands. “Email Patrick. Ask him to meet you. We certainly can’t go on like this.”
33
My friend hasn’t showed.
That’s what you’d think if you saw me here, in this quiet West Village bar, trying to make my Virgin Mary last all evening. Just another student waiting on her date. A little more dressy than some of the other women here, maybe.
“Hello, Claire.”
He startles me, approaching from the shadows, and I have to stifle the instinct to flinch. He bends down to kiss my cheek, and just for a moment, as his pale-green eyes brush mine, I’m certain he can see everything, knows everything: that he can sense the wires taped to my skin and the betrayal in my heart.
“What are you drinking?” he asks as he drops casually into the next seat. He signals to the bartender.
“Actually, we’re not staying. We’re going someplace else. Another bar.”
He frowns. “So why didn’t we meet there?”
“It’s not the kind of place you can arrange to meet people. Shall we go?”
I don’t explain any more until we’re almost there. One of the last of its kind from the old days, Kathryn’s told me, when places like Mineshaft and The Vault made New York City a byword for sexual exploration.
Eventually I stop. “This is it.”
There’s no sign, just a buzzer. We go down some steps to a small lobby that contains only a greeter, a lectern, and a curtained door. The greeter looks down her studded nose at me. Since I’m wearing a brand-new Prada jacket, bought with my second month’s pay, that’s faintly irritating.
When we’ve completed the membership formalities, signed a copy of the rules, and stepped through the door, I understand why she wasn’t impressed. Prada doesn’t count for much, in here.
In fact, anything made of fabric doesn’t count for much in here. In here, the favored materials are leather, PVC, rubber, and Saran wrap. Oh, and skin. They like skin a lot. Particularly if it’s pierced, written on, or tattooed.
My first thought, irrationally, is How the hell do they ever get home, looking like that?
A man walks past us. He’s wearing leather trousers, nothing else, and holding a chain. The chain leads to a ring embedded in the nipple of a breathtakingly pretty girl. The word SLAVE is written across her breasts in marker pen.
Looking around, I see leather masks, harnesses, strange golf-ball gags. Another man is wearing a hood that covers his entire face, with just a tube to breathe through. Music pulses through the crowd, so deep and low I feel it in my solar plexus.
On a raised podium, two men are taking turns to paddle a woman who’s strapped into a frame. A small knot of people have gathered to watch. The wall behind the frame is covered with implements, neatly hung on pegs as in a joiner’s workshop: coils of ropes and leather restraints, handcuffs and clamps, elaborate cat-o’-nine-tails and Charlie Chaplin canes.
Patrick and I watch for a while. Eventually, at some prearranged signal, the men stop. One of them makes the woman kiss the paddle while the other unties her. People drift away, some into the darkened side rooms.
“What do you want to do next?” I say to Patrick. I have to yell over the music.
“Find somewhere that serves alcohol,” he says. “Preferably a good Burgundy. And preferably somewhere we can hear each other talk.”
* * *
—
“So what did you think? Honestly?”
“Honestly?” Patrick studies me over the rim of his glass. “I suppose I was a little surprised to find myself there. Then intrigued. And finally, I had to stop myself from laughing.”
“Laughing?” I repeat, puzzled.
He shrugs, smiling. “It’s all so very earnest, isn’t it? And, at the same time, absurd. All those ridiculous rules about permissions and safe words. The fact is, it’s about as dangerous as a ride at Disney World.”
“Oh.”
“But I do appreciate the honesty with which you’ve shared your desires with me, Claire,” he adds. “Even if games of submission and control
aren’t to my own taste, I can appreciate why others might like them.”
“What do you mean, not to your own taste?” I say. “You wrote those fantasies—”
He shakes his head. “I’m a translator of other people’s work—a copyist. I can slip into the style of Baudelaire, or the style of Proust, or the style of drugstore porn for that matter. It’s all the same to me. In fact, half the pleasure is assuming a new identity—getting inside the mind of another person. It doesn’t mean that’s who I really am.”
“So you don’t…” I frown. “You don’t get off on S and M?”
“Only in as much as it gives my partner pleasure. I have no particular interest in it myself.”
“Then why agree to write that stuff in the first place?”
He smiles. “Because you asked me to. And I very much wanted to give you a gift you’d appreciate. Besides, I like to know what makes people tick. I put it down to being an orphan.”
I stare at him. “You’re an orphan?”
“Yes.” He looks surprised by my reaction. “But I was one of the lucky ones—I got on well with the family I was placed with. Why?”
“I’m…” This is frying my brain. My character has a dead parent, I recall, but only one. So I can’t tell Patrick I was fostered too.
“I lost my dad when I was ten,” I mutter. “And I’m not close to my mom. But I know it’s not the same thing at all.”
He nods. “Perhaps not. But I thought I could sense something about you…a kind of toughness, mixed with fragility. A detachment…It’s hard to explain. But when you feel it yourself, you learn to recognize it in others. People who are looking to love and be loved unconditionally, but who find it hard to accept when we find it. Outsiders trying to be insiders, searching for a substitute family…And sometimes we think we’ve found it in a club or a group. Maybe that’s what drew you to the fetish scene, Claire. Maybe you were simply looking for a different set of outcasts to belong to.”
“Maybe,” I say, but in my head I’m running that paragraph again. Replacing the words fetish scene with actors.
You got me, Patrick.
“There’s a feeling you become used to, when you’re orphaned,” he adds. “It’s like when you’re swimming in the ocean at night, and you suddenly start to wonder what’s underneath you. And you realize that if you don’t keep moving, you’ll drown…because there’s nothing holding you up. Just darkness and deep water. You’re alone, utterly alone. It’s all of them, but just one of you.”
I know. Patrick, I know.
* * *
—
We go on talking for what seems like hours. Which itself is pretty weird. Usually when I talk to men, they’re hitting on me, or vice versa. Either way, conversation’s wrapped up in thirty minutes, tops. Just chatting about stuff—poetry, New York, his trips to Europe—is something new for me.
And, despite all my attempts to keep a professional distance, I like him. He’s clever and well-read, and though he clearly knows far more about literature and art than me, he’s never patronizing. He seems genuinely interested in my opinions.
It takes an effort of will to remember to drop some of Kathryn’s verbal lures into the conversation, the oblique references to my dark backstory that are supposedly going to draw him out.
They don’t, of course. He doesn’t respond to any of them and fairly soon I give up on them altogether.
* * *
—
When we leave the bar, he insists on sharing a cab and dropping me off outside my apartment. East Harlem’s a rough area, he says.
He walks me to the door, and that’s when he pulls me toward him and kisses me for the first time. I knew he was going to. And of course I have to kiss him back.
It’s only a stage kiss, I tell myself. Just like you’ve done a hundred times before. It doesn’t mean a thing. Your character enjoys the feel of his arms, the hard heft of his chest, the press of his lips, the knowledge that you’re finally breaking through this man’s layers of reserve and discovering that he likes you, just as you like him. Your character.
Not you.
34
“We’re going to have to be more subtle,” Kathryn says.
They arrived a few minutes after I got in. But the euphoria is noticeably absent this time.
“He’s clearly going to be ultra-cautious,” she adds. “Secrecy has become a way of life for him.”
“Not so long ago, you said his loneliness would lead him to take risks,” I object.
“This isn’t an exact science, Claire.”
“It doesn’t seem to be much of a science at all,” I mutter.
“We make a hypothesis, then we test the hypothesis,” Kathryn says crisply. “If it doesn’t stack up, we move on.”
“But he still hasn’t incriminated himself.” For the first time I detect a note of frustration in Frank’s voice.
“I always said he might hide among the BDSM community, but he was unlikely to be part of it. In a sense, that’s been borne out by this latest development—”
“We can’t go to a judge for a warrant on the basis that our suspect appears to be a regular guy,” Frank says tersely. “We’ve got nothing.”
“No,” Kathryn admits. “So far, there’s nothing.”
That’s because there’s nothing to find.
The realization falls into my brain like a thunderbolt.
Patrick’s innocent.
I don’t say it out loud. Partly because I know Kathryn will tell me it isn’t my place to make judgments like that. But also because while I keep it to myself, it’s my secret, something I can hug like a comforter.
The way I’d like to hug Patrick.
I wonder what it will take to make Kathryn and Frank understand he’s not their man. And what they’ll do when that moment finally comes. Will they just disappear from his life and expect me to do the same?
I don’t want that day to come, I realize. Not yet, anyway.
Or is there a chance that won’t be how this plays out? Is there a possibility that one day Patrick and I could have…I hardly dare put the thought into words.
Could he and I have something together?
It seems almost impossible. But then, nothing about this crazy situation is following any normal logic.
* * *
—
Frank and Kathryn leave, still bickering. But I can’t relax. The apartment feels claustrophobic. Staring around at the grunge and filth, I realize how tacky it is, how one-dimensional. Like the set of some terrible student production, the kind of over-the-top one-woman show that involves shouting at the audience.
This isn’t me. And it isn’t Patrick, either.
The snake, which seems to be nocturnal, writhes in a complicated knot-pattern against the wall of its tank. I have no idea if it’s male or female, but lately I’ve found myself calling it Kathryn.
I need some air.
* * *
—
Seeing as how I’m dressed up anyway, I go to a club, just for the sheer physical release of stepping onto the dance floor and feeling my body taken over by music. There’s a dealer by the fire exit who lets me have two pills for the price of one, since it’s a weeknight.
By three, my body’s tired but my brain’s still buzzing. That’s when I think of the Harley Bar, the one with the motorbikes hanging from the ceiling. And Brian, the Australian barman with the dishcloth tucked into his jeans, who gets off at three.
Sure enough, when I get there he’s just closing up. It doesn’t take much flirting before he asks me back to his place.
But for some reason, tonight the whole sex-with-a-new-person thing doesn’t work its usual magic. Instead of making me feel dangerous and bold, tonight it just seems a bit pointless.
Because however much Brian tells me I’m beautiful or a
mazing or scary or crazy, the person I really want to hear those things from isn’t there.
35
I get back to the apartment just before noon. My eyes are gritty and my mouth feels like the stuff florists arrange flowers in. I walk in and stop dead, not sure what I’m seeing.
Overnight, the place has been transformed. The walls are a delicate cream. The animal skulls and thrift-shop props have vanished. Now there’s Swedish furniture, West Elm sofas, bright Turkish kilims. The guitar and amplifier are gone; high-end Sonos speakers whisper classical music instead. In place of rock posters, prints in bleached wood frames line the walls. A glass coffee table bears a stack of art books about Georgia O’Keeffe and Toulouse-Lautrec.
And as if by some wave of a magician’s wand, the snake has turned into a tortoiseshell cat, regarding me lazily from the sofa.
“She’s called Augusta,” Kathryn says, coming in from the other room to find me stroking its ears.
“Really?”
“What—you think the cat needs a cover name? Of course she’s called Augusta. Where have you been?”
“I needed some downtime.” I indicate the new décor. “What prompted all this?”
She looks at me, lips pursed. For a moment I think she’s about to bawl me out, but she just says, “In the future, make sure you take the necklace, will you? We need to be able to check that you’re all right.”
“The microphone wouldn’t have been appropriate last night, believe me. Not unless you wanted Detective Durban to have a heart attack.”
She ignores that. “In answer to your question, I was thinking over something you said. About the Vénus Noire and the Vénus Blanche. Maybe you need to be more of a White Venus—the pure, elegant beauty he can fantasize about desecrating.”
“Whoa,” I say. “That’s quite a character shift. I need to think that through—”
“Well, don’t think too long. Patrick’s got two tickets for the Booth tonight.”