Hostile Witness (23 page)

“TELL ME HOW YOU
got involved with Jimmy Moore,” I ordered Veronica. “Tell me how.”

She was stretched beneath me, her wrists tied stiffly to the headboard with long silk scarves, her legs pinned down by my bent knees. She snapped at my belly with her teeth, at my chest. I stretched my body over hers, pressing down hard, and we clawed each other with our mouths. It wasn’t kissing in any way I had known kissing to be before, there was a violence to it, a rapaciousness. We stirred each other’s hunger and satisfied it at the same time. When she bucked her hips and raised her knees, opening herself for me, I sat up again and grabbed her hair and laughed at her.

“Tell me.”

“After,” she breathed.

“Not after. Now.”

“Let me loose and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me and I might let you loose.”

She jerked her hands trying to get free but the scarves, long and soft and creamy maroon, were strong and the knots I had tied with boy scout accuracy and enthusiasm held. In the light of the candles we had set around the loft bed her flat stomach flickered yellow as her hips rose violently. She tried to kick me off but I rode her like a bucking mule and stayed right where I was. I stretched my weight on top of her and we clawed each other with our mouths and again she tried to open herself to me and I
wouldn’t let her. It was my turn on top and I had control for once and I was going to keep it.

These scarves and pseudo-violent acts, this outbreak of forced control and mock desperation, this was not my usual thing. I had liked my sex slow and soft, an easy glide, a dance of the lips and the hips, rising and falling in a series of synchronous crescendos, Fred and Ginger swaying together in black and white as he tapped out a subtle mysterious rhythm and the feathers of her boa floated about them in sensual waves. If the sex of my earlier life had been a movie, it would be
Dancing in the Dark.
But it had turned with Veronica. We weren’t in the middle of a light romantic comedy. Sex with her was more like
Marathon Man
and she was the dentist. But we had tried it my way and we had tried it her way and believe me when I tell you this—her way was better.

I knew I shouldn’t be there in her apartment, but the danger of it all drew me as much as the sheer addictive kineticism of our sex. That I had been warned, that a car window had shattered in front of my face, that if Jimmy found out about us everything might be lost, all that and more drew me there. Even as I banged the steering wheel of my car with my palms at my foolishness, I still drove to that Olde City building, coming at her beckon, where I would rise up in that Plexiglas windowed elevator and knock on her door, knock quietly, head bowed, as reverent as a supplicant before the Pope.

That night she had pulled the scarves out of the drawer beside her bed and floated them across her chest like a harem girl teasing her eunuch. “I don’t think you’re ready for these yet,” she had said.

“I don’t think so either.”

“There are places you’re not ready to go.”

“You’re right.”

“But aren’t you in the least bit curious?”

“About what?”

“About what it’s like to tie me up?”

“I can imagine it.”

“But that’s the point, Victor. With me you don’t have to imagine. You can do anything you want to me. It’s too bad Roberta is out of town.”

“Roberta?”

“She’s a friend of mine. A model. You’d like her, Victor. She’s very thin, very blonde. All the boys just die for Roberta.”

“You’re fine enough for me.”

“I’d be there too. It’s about appetites. The more you get, the more you need. It grows like a marvelous cancer. A week in Cancun with me and Roberta and you’ll never be satisfied with just one again.”

“Cancun?”

“Roberta likes to travel.”

“How about just you and me?”

“Where?”

“Someplace exotic.”

“I’m not sure I trust your taste for the exotic. You’re not a very adventurous boy.”

“Someplace you’ve never been.”

“Cleveland? You want to take me to Cleveland?”

“Tahiti.”

“I’ve been to Tahiti. Too long a flight for a beach.”

“Thailand.”

“Too hot.”

“Burma. Have you ever been to Rangoon?”

“No, take me to Rangoon. Yes, Rangoon.”

“But first Cleveland. The best hotel in the city.”

“Motel Six?”

“Sure, and a bottle of Bud from room service.”

“When?”

“After this trial.”

“Could we bring Roberta?”

“I don’t need anything more than you.”

“Not for you, for me.”

“I’m not enough?”

“In case you tire.”

That’s when I tied the half hitch to the bed post, a solid sailing knot, and wrapped the scarf tightly around her wrist, so tightly that her wrist purpled when she gave it a solid yank. “Not so tight,” she said with a laugh and I ignored her, as I was sure she hoped I would. There were enough scarves to bind her ankles too, but I thought it would be more acrobatic if I left her legs free to wriggle about. “Really, you should loosen them,” she said, “they’re too tight.” But no matter what she said I did what I wanted. “Stop it, you’ll leave a mark.” She was taking me to a strange outer world where no meant yes and stop meant go and all that I had learned about political correctness and sexual courtesy was meant to be breached. There was something clicking in my brain stem, something primordial, something with the glorious confidence of the unself-conscious, something that had existed long before the forebrain swelled and turned sex into an intellectual exercise, something that had been pounded down in my years of politeness in bed, my years of caring if it was good for her, my years of striving for joint satisfaction. “Stop it. Please. I’m begging you, please. God stop stop no stop it now.” The ultimate, I had always believed, was the simultaneous orgasm, the instantaneous joinder of passions and fulfillments, where two became one. But the part of my brain stem stimulated by Veronica, as if she were an electrode buried deep into a mass of long dormant neurons, cared nothing for simultaneity. It was selfish and violent and brutal. It was Neanderthal, prowling with a club in each hand, one wooden, one swollen flesh, searching for satisfaction, demanding it, objectifying anything that could be grabbed and placed beneath it, anything whose sole purpose was to sharpen desire at the same time it satisfied it in a painful gut-wrenching burst. It wasn’t pretty what I felt
gurgling inside my brain stem, it wasn’t something that was pleasant to admit was within me, but there was nothing pleasant about sex with Veronica. It was closer to hell than to heaven, its power was buried in the genetic memory of the past, but once discovered, it was a place I couldn’t leave. And even after I came I stayed impossibly hard inside her, my brain stem allowing for no respite. I sucked a bruise out of the base of her breast and bit her earlobe and with my knees spreading her knees and my hip bone grinding into her hip bone her voice broke into a torrent of ancient cries and while I drove on and on into the mist of my predatory history she came despite my caring not at all and I kept on despite her cries and she came again in a yelp, scraping my neck with her lower teeth, and the back of my neck burst apart in a maddening orgasm and she sucked my Adam’s apple and flipped her loose legs high until her feet kicked my head and she screamed murderously.

When I collapsed on top of her, my weight pressing her legs onto the mattress, she jerked her arms as high as the scarves would allow and let out a howl that sounded like the baying of a great wounded cat, golden, striped, saber-toothed.

I rested there, just like that, still inside her, lying atop her like a corpse. I might have dozed off, I couldn’t tell, but it seemed like I lay atop her for the longest time. She said nothing, made no movement to shrug me off. There was a silence about us, a haze that only slowly lifted as the sounds of cars slipping along the cobblestones of Church Street edged their way through the quiet. In my chest I could feel a strange asynchronous heartbeat—ba ba boom boom, ba ba boom ba boom, boom ba ba boom boom, ba boom ba boom, ba ba boom boom. I worried for a moment, thinking the intensity of the sex had chased me into arrhythmia, but then I realized my chest was pressing so hard onto hers that I was feeling both our beats. I pushed
myself up with weary arms and squatted atop her. She was still tied up and the fact that I remained in control thrilled me. I cupped her left breast with my hand and squeezed her nipple between my fingers. Her eyes stayed closed but her pretty face twisted into something carnal and pained.

Without opening her eyes she said, “God, I’m sick of old men.”

And that was when I ordered her to tell me about how she ended up with Jimmy Moore. She struggled a bit, and tried again to yank her arms loose. I kissed her gently on her lips, on her cheek, on her eyes, on her lips again, the softness of my kisses calming her. Her eyes were still closed. I rubbed my hands across her sides and said, “Tell me,” and so she told me.

She was born in Iowa, she said as I rubbed my tongue across the lower edge of her breast, in a small town west of Cedar Rapids called Solon. In Solon the kids used to hang out at Jones’s House of Pork and eat fried tenderloin sandwiches as big as a head and play pool, a quarter a game, and grow fat and pimply. It was a small town, not far from a lake where they swam on sweltering summer days, and there was a city park and an American Legion baseball team and once a year the town would gussy itself up for Solon Beef Days and people would come in from all over eastern Iowa and there would be carnival rides and a parade and a steak dinner with corn and salad for $2.79 served under a tent.

Her father taught at the university, about thirty minutes south of Solon, medieval history, and at night he would tell her tales of kings and queens and bloody princes until she knew more about the House of York than the House of Pork. Her dream, always, as long as she could remember, was to marry a prince and live in a castle and hold court. She didn’t know if there were any princes left in the world
or if they had grown extinct, like dinosaurs, but she knew for sure that there weren’t any princes in Iowa.

Her mother she remembered only from photographs, tall, plain, an intense concern grooved into the flesh around her eyes. Maybe she could see into the future, Veronica said, and see her early, painful death from a burst appendix. She was a fine woman, Veronica’s father had told her, strong, gentle. Veronica’s father was on a trip east, lecturing at Princeton, and her mother hadn’t told anyone about the pain, certain it would go away like an upset stomach, unwilling to leave her baby daughter to find a doctor. Her father had flown to Princeton a promising young scholar and had flown back a widower with a baby daughter to raise alone. He was totally gray before he turned forty.

She went to the University of Iowa and pledged a sorority and dated football players and golfers and in the homecoming parade sat decked out like Princess Di on a sorority float made out to be Buckingham Palace. When she had the chance to go to London for her junior year she jumped at it. Her father died while she was away, a sudden heart attack, and she returned just long enough to bury him and sell the house in Solon and cash out his pension before returning to England, an orphan with money to spend. That’s where she met a boy named Saffron Hyde.

“He was a poet,” she told me. “I met him in a pub in Southgate, a rock club. He came up to me and asked me to buy him a pint and I did. He was skinny and nervous and unlike anyone I had ever met before. There were no Saffron Hydes in Iowa. I had an apartment in the North End and he came home with me that night, more like a stray puppy dog than a seducer, but he moved in the next day. We drank a lot, I quit school, he wrote poetry about me, we made sweet love, but he wasn’t really interested, which was fine, actually, and every night we went to the art films at the museum.”

“What was his poetry like?” I asked.

“Dark, jittery. Much of it was very funny, but there was always a black loneliness behind the jokes. I thought it breathtaking.”

“Did he publish it?”

“No. He let me see it, some of his friends, but that was it. He said it was the poetry that mattered, not how many people read it.”

“That sounds like an excuse.”

“Well, he was a great one for excuses.”

“How did he live? How did he support himself?”

“I supported him.”

“And before you?”

She shrugged, an absurd little shrug, calm and matter-of-fact, despite her wrists being bound to the bedposts. “I didn’t ask, he never said.”

“Did you love him?”

“More than anything before or since. He was the love of my life, the prince I had been dreaming of since my girlhood. So when he burst in one afternoon, drunk and full of excitement, and said we just had to go to India, I said ‘When,’ he said, ‘Right this instant,’ I said, ‘Fine.’”

They took the ferry and backpacked through Europe, Spain, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, living like royalty, for backpackers, staying in pensions and rooming houses, eating in restaurants with tablecloths. They took a meandering route, flitting off to wherever seemed the most interesting, but always heading east, taking trains, hitchhiking, boats, Greece, Crete, Turkey, Iran, always on a route toward India. He had to see the Ganges, he said, bathe himself in the holy river, tap into a spiritual source centuries older than his Saxon heritage. He had read Hermann Hesse, it had changed his life, he needed to immerse himself in the sacred waters, he said.

“Remember when Hermann Hesse used to change lives?” I asked.

“You have to read it at a certain age,” she said.

“I read
Siddhartha
when I was fourteen,” I said. “I think I was too old even then.”

“That’s to your pity.”

It was a wonderful trip, she continued, revelatory actually. She was ecstatic and the further away she moved from Iowa the freer she became, swimming naked in the public beaches on the French Riviera, trading her blue jeans for peasant skirts in Corfu, buying drugs in the open-air markets outside Constantinople.