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.