“Oh?”
“Just a lot of nervous energy. I feel fidgety, that’s why I can’t keep my hands off my hair.”
“I thought you were just getting used to it.”
“Yes, but I also can’t seem to keep my hands still.”
“Is that right,” he said. “You say Jennifer’s out for the evening?”
“Well, I don’t think she’ll be too late. School tomorrow, of course.”
“And Luke’s out, his car’s gone.”
“I think he said something about the baseball game.”
“Yes, that’s right, he told me he was going to watch the Royals. Well, I know why you’re so fidgety.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. And Dr. Adlon knows just the treatment you need.”
“Oh, my,” she said. “So early in the evening?”
“We’re all alone.”
“So we are. Of course the phone could ring.”
“Not if I took it off the hook.”
“What a clever man you are,” she said.
Upstairs they undressed quickly and in silence. She left the drapes undrawn — there were woods behind the house, and no one could see into any of the bedroom windows. She got into bed and he joined her, taking her in his arms. For a long moment he held her, feeling the length of her body against his.
Then she lay on her back and closed her eyes. His hand touched her cheek and swept slowly down over her body, cupping the roundness of her breast, brushing the flat plain of her stomach and the slight convexity of her abdomen. When his fingers reached her pubic mound she opened her thighs, and he moved to crouch between them.
He touched her, first with his breath alone, then with his mouth. This was what she liked, and as always he found himself wholly in sync with her inner rhythms, automatically varying the pace and intensity of his lovemaking, speeding up, slowing down, speeding up again, teasing a little, holding her off, and then, finally, taking her all the way.
Her climax was powerful, a long rolling wave of passion to which she utterly gave herself over, swinging her head from side to side, crying out, sobbing, her whole body bucking and twitching beneath him. It was men who were always seeking sex, he thought, but it was women who got so much more out of it, their comings a whole artillery barrage in contrast to the single staccato bark of a male orgasm. He continued his ministrations, coaxing the last little spasm of fulfillment out of her, then moved at last to lie down beside her with her taste dark and rich in his mouth and her scent filling the whole room.
“God,” she said.
“See? I knew what you needed.”
“You always do.” Then, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
He had gotten an erection shortly after he had placed his mouth upon her. This happened some of the time, but not always, and it did not seem to be in any way related to the pleasure either of them took in the act. He had remained erect throughout, and was so now, but he felt under no obligation to do anything about it. He lay there until it had softened and shrank. By then she was asleep. He covered her with the sheet, got dressed, and went downstairs.
For some years now their lovemaking had always taken this form.
It was the only way that gave her real pleasure, and she had once admitted that she had usually feigned her orgasms during coitus, something he had half known all along. His oral attentions to her, usually a prelude, now became their sole practice.
He sometimes wondered how she thought he found fulfillment. Perhaps she assumed he climaxed while performing upon her, either spontaneously or with manual assistance. Perhaps she suspected he masturbated afterward, or used prostitutes. Perhaps she didn’t think about it. Whatever her thoughts, she kept them to herself.
She certainly wouldn’t have wanted to know the truth. That his orgasms were very infrequent, and, in recent years, never accompanied by seminal ejaculation. And that he had not had intercourse in eight years.
Not since the first time he killed a woman.
It had not eluded Mark that there might be something noteworthy in the fact that his first act of murder had taken place within two months of his first real estate deal. He was reasonably self-analytical, and he thought he knew why the one development in his life had precipitated the other. It was not, to be sure, that purchasing that first duplex north of Gage Park had somehow corrupted him, that it had instilled a desire not previously present. On the contrary, the hunger to kill women, to find release and fulfillment in their death, seemed to him to have been part of his sexual makeup all his life.
His earliest fantasies, before he’d had the wit to accompany them with masturbation, had involved the torture and death of helpless female partners. When he did discover masturbation, violent and murderous fantasies always played a part; when he tried to perform the act without the fantasies, out of moral revulsion for them, either he was not able to climax at all or his orgasm was weak and unsatisfying.
He had never considered acting on his fantasies. As far as he was concerned, they were a perversion forever confined to his inner life, taking place exclusively in the theatre of his mind. No one would ever know the truth about his sexual impulses, and whatever secret shame he suffered would be their only consequence.
He had had fears at one point that he might crave to act them out. While he was not a virgin when he married Marilee, his experience was minimal; oral sex from prostitutes, a brief clothes-pushed-aside coupling with a girl he’d dated a few times, both of them drunk the night it happened. On none of those occasions had he had any urge to injure his partner, and when he met and fell in love with Marilee he found such urges inconceivable. He loved her, he revered her, and the thought of her suffering any injury whatsoever, let alone at his hands, was unendurable.
Making love to Marilee, he found himself using his fantasies almost from the beginning. They were not invariably present, but without them he sometimes had difficulty performing.
But fantasy was fantasy and reality was reality. In his mind, horrible scenarios were acted out; in his bed, he and Marilee expressed their perfect love for one another. It was at the very least ironic that his mind and body should be following two such wholly different scripts, that his, children were conceived in love to the cerebral accompaniment of burnings and dismemberings, stabbings and garrotings. But he loved them none the less for it, and they brought him no less joy.
He worried about his fantasies less as time passed. Once in a while he would try to do without them, but they always returned, and he grew increasingly to take them for granted. They were mental Muzak, sometimes barely noticed on a conscious level, but the business ran less efficiently in their absence.
Of course it was his success with real estate that enabled him to turn fantasy into fact. Not that he woke up one morning and told himself, Hey, I just bought a house, I think I’ll go kill a girl. But his real estate dealings empowered him, transformed him from a man floating through life, working for his father-in-law, barely scraping by, to a confident enterprising self-starter in charge of his own destiny.
He felt alive, he felt successful, he felt strong. But he also felt increasingly restless, and several nights he had left the house while Marilee and the kids were asleep, getting in the car and driving for hours over country roads around Topeka.
Then one night, itching with restlessness, he found himself driving into Kansas City. Downtown, somewhere around Central Avenue, he’d come upon a flock of black streetwalkers in wigs and hot pants, strutting on the pavement and working the cars that cruised the street.
Several times in recent years he’d gone with prostitutes, paying twenty dollars to sit in his car parked on a dark street while a girl’s head bobbed in his lap.