Q.
‘The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote.’
Q….
‘Yes and so in the anecdote there she is, blithely hitchhiking along the interstate, and on this particular day the fellow in the car that stops almost the moment she puts her thumb out happens to — she said she knew she’d made a mistake the moment she got in. The car. Just from what she called the energy field inside the car, she said, and that fear gripped her soul the moment she got in. And sure enough, the fellow in the car soon exits the highway and exits off into some kind of secluded area, which seems to be what psychotic sex criminals always do, you’re always reading secluded area in all the accounts of quote brutal sex slayings and grisly discoveries of unidentified remains by a scout troop or amateur botanist, et cetera, common knowledge which you can be sure she was reviewing, horror-stricken, as the fellow began acting more and more creepy and psychotic even on the interstate and then soon exited into the first available secluded area.’
Q.
‘Her explanation was that she did not in fact feel the psychotic energy field until she had shut the car’s door and they were moving, at which time it was too late. She was not melodramatic about it but described herself as literally paralyzed with terror. Though you might be wondering as I did when one hears about cases like this as to why the victim doesn’t simply bail out of the car the minute the fellow begins grinning maniacally or acting erratic or casually discussing how much he loathes his mother and dreams of raping her with her LPGA-endorsed sand wedge and then stabbing her 106 times, et cetera. But here she did point out that the prospect of bailing out of a rapidly moving car and hitting the macadam at sixty miles an — at the very least you break a leg or something, and then as you’re trying to drag yourself off the road into the underbrush of course what’s to keep the fellow from turning around to come back for you, which in addition let’s keep in mind that he’s now going to be additionally aggrieved about the rejection implicit in your preferring to hit the macadam at 60 m.p.h. rather than remain in his company, given that psychotic sex offenders have a notoriously low tolerance for rejection, and so forth.’
Q.
‘Something about his aspect, eyes, the quote energy field in the car — she said she instantly knew in the depths of her soul that the fellow’s intention was to brutally rape, torture, and kill her, she said. And I believed her here, that one can intuitively pick up on the epiphenomena of danger, sense psychosis in someone’s aspect — you needn’t buy into energy fields or ESP to accept mortal intuition. Nor would I even begin to try to describe what she looks like as she’s telling the story, reliving it, she’s naked, hair spilling all down her back, sitting meditatively cross-legged amid the wrecked bedding and smoking ultralight Merits from which she keeps removing the filters because she claims they’re full of additives and unsafe — unsafe as she’s sitting there chain-smoking, which was so patently irrational that I couldn’t even bring — yes and some kind of blister on her Achilles tendon, from the sandals, leaning with her upper body to follow the oscillation of the fan so she’s moving in and out of a wash of moon from the window whose angle of incidence itself alters as the moon moves up and across the window — all I can tell you is she was lovely. The bottoms of her feet dirty, almost black. The moon so full it looks engorged. And long hair spilling all over, more than — beautiful lustrous hair that makes you understand why women use conditioner. Tad’s boon companion Silverglade telling me she looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around and asking how long estrus lasts in her species and droll ho ho. My memory is more verbal than visual, I’m afraid. It’s on the sixth floor and my bedroom gets stuffy, she treated the fan like cold water and closed her eyes when it hit her. And by the time the psychotic fellow in question exits into the secluded area and finally comes straight out and indicates what his true intentions are — apparently detailing certain specific plans and procedures and implements — she’s not the least bit surprised, she said she’d known the kind of hideously twisted soul-energy she’d gotten into the car into, the kind of pitiless and unappeasable psychotic he was and what sort of interaction they were headed for in this secluded area, and concluding that she was going to become just another grisly discovery for some amateur botanist a few days hence unless she could focus her way into the sort of profound soul-connection that would make it difficult for the fellow to murder her. These were her words, this was the sort of pseudo-abstract terminology she — and yet at the same time I was now captivated enough by the anecdote to simply accept the terminology as a kind of foreign language without trying to judge it or press for clarification, I just decided to presume that focus was her obscure denomination’s euphemism for prayer, and that in a desperate situation like this who really was in any position to judge what would be a sound response to the sort of shock and terror she must be feeling, who could say with any certainty whether prayer wouldn’t be appropriate. Foxholes and atheists and so on. What I remember best is that by this time it was, for the first time, taking much less effort to listen to her — she had an unexpected ability to recount it in such a way as to deflect attention from herself and displace maximum attention onto the anecdote itself. I have to confess that it was the first time I did not find her one bit dull. Care for another?’
Q.
‘That she was not melodramatic about it, the anecdote, telling me, nor affecting an unnatural calm the way some people affect an unnatural nonchalance about narrating an incident that is meant to heighten their story’s drama and/or make them appear nonchalant and sophisticated, one or the other of which is often the most annoying part of listening to certain types of beautiful women structure a story or anecdote — that they are used to high levels of people’s attention, and need to feel that they control it, always trying to control the precise type and degree of your attention instead of simply trusting that you are paying the appropriate degree of attention. I’m sure you yourself have noticed this in very attractive women, that paying attention to them makes them immediately begin to pose, even if their pose is the affected nonchalance they affect to portray themselves as unposed. It becomes dull very quickly. But she was, or seemed, oddly unposed for someone this attractive and with this dramatic a story to tell. It struck me, listening. She seemed truly poseless in relating it, open to attention but not solicitous — nor contemptuous of the attention, or affecting disdain or contempt, which I hate. Some beautiful women, something wrong with their voice, some squeakiness or lack of inflection or a laugh like a machine gun and you flee in horror. Her speaking voice is a neutral alto without squeak or that long drawled O or vague air of nasal complaint that — also mercifully light on the likes and you knows that can make you chew the inside of your cheek with this type. Nor did she giggle. Her laugh was fully adult, full, good to hear. And that this was my first hint of sadness or melancholy, as I listened with increasing attention to the anecdote, that the qualities I found myself admiring in her narration of the anecdote were some of the same qualities about her I’d been contemptuous of when I’d first picked her up in the park.’