each wearing its own version of Harold’s grin — Hey, how are ya, how’s the wife, how’s the kids, writing any good books lately? The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire. I slipped my hands under her buttocks, lifting her, biting at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the breasts, anywhere my teeth could reach. ‘Tell me who he was!’ I shouted at her. ‘You know, I know you do!’ My voice was so muffled by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could have understood it. ‘Tell me, you bitch!’
On the path between Jo’s studio and the house I stood in the dark with the typewriter in my arms and that dream-spanning erection quivering below its metal bulk — all that ready and nothing willing. Except maybe for the night breeze. Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed-a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could belong to only one woman. I didn’t see the hand that reached around my hip to grip me — the typewriter was in the way — but I didn’t need to see it to know its color was brown. It squeezed, slowly tightening, the fingers wriggling.
‘What do you want to know, sugar?’ she asked from behind me. Still laughing. Still teasing. ‘Do you really want to know at all? Do you want to know or do you want to feel?’
‘Oh, you’re killing me!’ I cried. The typewriter — thirty or so pounds of IBM Selectric — was shaking back and forth in my arms. I could feel my muscles twanging like guitar strings.
‘Do you want to know who he was, sugar? That nasty man?’
‘Just do me, you bitch!’ I screamed. She laughed again — that harsh laughter that was almost like a cough — and squeezed me where the squeezing was best.
‘You hold still, now,’ she said. ‘You hold still, pretty boy, ‘less you want me to take fright and yank this thing of yours right out by the . . . ‘ I lost the rest as the whole world exploded in an orgasm so deep and strong that I thought it would simply tear me apart. I snapped my head back like a man being hung and ejaculated looking up at the stars. I screamed — I had to — and on the lake, two loons screamed back.
At the same time I was on the float. Jo was gone, but I could faintly hear the sound of the band
— -Sara and Sonny and the Red-Top Boys tearing through ‘Black Mountain Rag.’ I sat up, dazed and spent, fucked hollow. I couldn’t see the path leading up to the house, but I could discern its switchback course by the Japanese lanterns. My underpants lay beside me in a little wet heap. I picked them up and started to put them on, only because I didn’t want to swim back to shore with them in my hand. I stopped with them stretched between my knees, looking at my fingers. They were slimed with decaying flesh. Puffing out from beneath several of the nails were clumps of torn-out hair. Corpsehair.
‘Oh Jesus,’ I moaned. The strength went out of me. I flopped into wetness. I was in the north-wing bedroom. What I had landed in was hot, and at first I thought it was come. The dim glow of the nightlight showed darker stuff, however. Mattie was gone and the bed was full of blood. Lying in the middle of that soaking pool was something I at first glance took to be a clump of flesh or a piece of organ. I looked more closely and saw it was a stuffed animal, a black-furred object matted red with blood. I lay on my side looking at it, wanting to bolt out of the bed and flee from the room but unable to do it. My muscles were in a dead swoon. Who had I really been having sex with in this bed? And what had I done to her? In God’s name, what?
‘I don’t believe these lies,’ I heard myself say, and as though it were an incantation, I was slapped back together. That isn’t exactly what happened, bur it’s the only way of saying that seems to come close to whatever did. There were three of me — one on the float, one in the north bedroom, one on the path — and each one felt that hard slap, as if the wind had grown a fist. There was rushing
blackness, and in it the steady silver shaking of Bunter’s bell. Then it faded, and I faded with it. For a little while I was nowhere at all.
I came back to the casual chatter of birds on summer vacation and to that peculiar red darkness that means the sun is shining through your closed eyelids. My neck was stiff, my head was canted at a weird angle, my legs were folded awkwardly beneath me, and I was hot.
I lifted my head with a wince, knowing even as I opened my eyes that I was no longer in bed, no longer on the swimming float, no longer on the path between the house and the studio. It was floorboards under me, hard and uncompromising.
The light was dazzling. I squinched my eyes closed again and groaned like a man with a hangover. I eased them back open behind my cupped hands, gave them time to adjust, then cautiously uncovered them, sat all the way up, and looked around. I was in the upstairs hall, lying under the broken air conditioner. Mrs. Meserve’s note still hung from it. Sitting outside my office door was the green IBM with a piece of paper rolled into it. I looked down at my feet and saw that they were dirty. Pine needles were stuck to my soles, and one toe was scratched. I got up, staggered a little (my right leg had gone to sleep), then braced a hand against the wall and stood steady. I looked down at myself. I was wearing the Jockeys I’d gone to bed in, and I didn’t look as if I’d had an accident in them. I pulled out the waistband and peeked inside. My cock looked as it usually did; small and soft, curled up and asleep in its thatch of hair. If Noonan’s Folly had been adventuring in the night, there was no sign of it now.
‘It sure felt like an adventure,’ I croaked. I armed sweat off my forehead. It was stifling up here.
‘Not the kind I ever read about in The Hardy Boys, though.’
Then I remembered the blood-soaked sheet in the north bedroom, and the stuffed animal lying on its side in the middle of it. There was no sense of relief attached to the memory, that thank-God-it-was-only-a-dream feeling you get after a particularly nasty nightmare. It felt as real as any of the things I’d experienced in my measles fever-delirium . . . and all those things had been real, just distorted by my overheated brain.
I staggered to the stairs and limped down them, holding tight to the bannister in case my tingling leg should buckle. At the foot I looked dazedly around the living room, as if seeing it for the first time, and then limped down the north-wing corridor.
The bedroom door was ajar and for a moment I couldn’t bring myself to push it all the way open and go in. I was very badly scared, and my mind kept trying to replay an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the one about the man who strangles his wife during an alcoholic blackout. He spends the whole half hour looking for her, and finally finds her in the pantry, bloated and open-eyed. Kyra Devore was the only kid of stuffed-animal age I’d met recently, but she had been sleeping peacefully under her cabbage-rose coverlet when I left her mother and headed home. It was stupid to think I had driven all the way back to Wasp Hill Road, probably wearing nothing but my Jockeys, that I had —
What? Raped the woman? Brought the child here? In my sleep?
I got the typewriter, in my sleep, didn’t I? It’s sitting right upstairs in the goddam hallway.
Big difference between going thirty yards through the woods and five miles down the road to —
I wasn’t going to stand out here listening to those quarrelling voices in my head. If I wasn’t crazy
— and I didn’t think I was — listening to those contentious assholes would probably send me there, and by the express. I reached out and pushed the bedroom door open.