Gerald's Game

  "Let me up!"

  "Yes ... eventually." His other hand shot out. This time it was her right breast he pinched, and this time the pinch was so hard it fired off nerves in little white sparkles all the way down her side to her hip. "For now, spread those lovely legs, me proud beauty!"

  She took a closer look at him and saw a terrible thing: he knew. He knew she wasn't kidding about not wanting to go on with it. He knew, but he had chosen not to know he knew. Could a person do that?

  You bet, the no-bullshit voice said. If you're a hotshot shyster in the biggest corporate law-firm north of Boston and south of Montreal, I guess you can know whatever you want to know and not know whatever you don't want to. I think you're in big trouble here, honey. The kind of trouble that ends marriages. Better grit your teeth and squint your eyes, because I think one bitch of a vaccination shot is on the way.

  That grin. That ugly, mean-spirited grin.

  Pretending ignorance. And doing it so hard that later on he would be able to pass a lie-detector test on the subject. I thought it was part of the game, he would say, all hurt and wide-eyed. I really did. And if she persisted, driving at him with her anger, he would eventually fall back to the oldest defense of them all ... and then slip into it, like a lizard into a crack in a rock: You liked it. You know you did. Why don't you admit it?

  Pretending into ignorance. Knowing but planning to go ahead anyway. He'd handcuffed her to the bedposts, had done it with her own cooperation, and now, oh shit, let's not gild the lily, now he meant to rape her, actually rape her while the door banged and the dog barked and the chainsaw snarled and the loon yodeled out there on the lake. He really meant to do it. Yessir, boys, hyuck, hyuck, hyuck, you ain't really had pussy until you've had pussy that's jumpin around underneath you like a hen on a hot griddle. And if she did go to Maddy's when this exercise in humiliation was over, he would continue to insist that rape had been the furthest thing from his mind.

  He placed his pink hands against her thighs and began spreading her legs. She did not resist much; for the moment, at least, she was too horrified and amazed by what was going on here to resist much.

  And that's exactly the right attitude, the more familiar voice inside her spoke up. Just lie there quietly and let him shoot his squirt. After all, what's the big deal? He's done it at least a thousand times before and you never once turned green. In case you forgot, it's been quite a few years since you were a blushing virgin.

  And what would happen if she didn't listen and obey the counsel of that voice? What was the alternative?

  As if in answer, a horrid picture rose in her mind. It was herself she saw, testifying in divorce court. She didn't know if there still were such things as divorce courts in Maine, but that in no way dimmed the vividness of the vision. She saw herself dressed in her conservative pink Donna Karan suit, with her peach silk blouse beneath it. Her knees and ankles were primly together. Her small clutch bag, the white one, was in her lap. She saw herself telling a judge who looked like the late Harry Reasoner that yes, it was true she had accompanied Gerald to the summer house of her own free will, yes, she had allowed him to tether her to the bedposts with two sets of Kreig handcuffs, also of her own free will, and yes, as a matter of fact they had played such games before, although never at the place on the lake.

  Yes, Judge. Yes.

  Yes, yes, yes.

  As Gerald continued to spread her legs, Jessie heard herself telling the judge who looked like Harry Reasoner about how they had started with silk scarves, and how she had allowed the game to go on, progressing from scarves to ropes to handcuffs, even though she had quickly tired of the whole thing. Had become disgusted by it. So disgusted, in fact, that she had allowed Gerald to drive her the eighty-three miles from Portland to Kashwakamak Lake on a weekday in October; so revolted she had once again allowed him to chain her up like a dog; so bored with the whole thing that she had been wearing nothing but a pair of nylon panties so wispy you could have read The New York Times classified section through them. The judge would believe it all and sympathize with her most deeply. Of course he would. Who wouldn't? She could see herself sitting there on the witness stand and saying, "So there I was, handcuffed to the bedpost and wearing nothing but some underwear from Victoria's Secret and a smile, but I changed my mind at the last minute, and Gerald knew it, and that makes it rape."

  Yes sir, that would do her, all right. Bet your boots.

  She came out of this appalling fantasy to find Gerald yanking at her panties. He was kneeling between her legs, his face so studious that you might have been tempted to believe it was the Bar Exam he was planning to take instead of his unwilling wife. There was a runner of white spittle coursing down his chin from the center of his plump lower lip.

  Let him do it, Jessie. Let him shoot his squirt. It's that stuff in his balls that's making him crazy, and you know it. It makes them all crazy. When he gets rid of it, you'll be able to talk to him again. You'll be able to deal with him. So don't make a fuss--just lie there and wait until he's got it out of his system.

  Good advice, and she supposed she would have followed it if not for the new presence inside her. This unnamed newcomer clearly thought that Jessie's usual source of advice--the voice she had over the years come to think of as Goodwife Budingame--was a wimp of the highest order. Jessie still might have let things run their course, but two things happened simultaneously. The first was her realization that, although her wrists were cuffed to the bedposts, her feet and legs were free. At the same moment she realized this, the runner of drool fell off Gerald's chin. It dangled for a moment, elongating, and then fell on her midriff, just above the navel. Something about this sensation was familiar, and she was swept by a horribly intense sensation of deja vu. The room seemed to darken around her, as if the windows and the skylight had been replaced with panes of smoked glass.

  It's his spunk, she thought, although she knew perfectly well it wasn't. It's his goddam spunk.

  Her response was not so much directed at Gerald as at that hateful feeling that came flooding up from the bottom of her mind. In a very real sense she acted with no thought at all, but only lashed out with the instinctive, panicky revulsion of a woman who realizes the trapped thing fluttering in her hair is a bat.

  She drew back her legs, her rising right knee barely missing the promontory of his chin, and then drove her bare feet out again like pistons. The sole and instep of her right drove deep into the bowl of his belly. The heel of her left smashed into the stiff root of his penis and the testicles hanging below it like pale, ripe fruit.

  He rocked backward, his butt coming down on his plump, hairless calves. He tilted his head up toward the skylight and the white ceiling with its reflected patterns of sunripples and voiced a high, wheezy scream. The loon on the lake cried out again just then, in hellish counterpoint; to Jessie it sounded like one male commiserating with another.

  Gerald's eyes weren't slitted now; they weren't gleaming, either. They were wide open, they were as blue as today's flawless sky (the thought of seeing that sky over the autumn-empty lake had been the deciding factor when Gerald had called from the office and said he'd had a postponement and would she like to go up to the summer place at least for the day and maybe overnight), and the expression in them was an agonized glare she could hardly look at. Cords of tendon stood out on the sides of his neck. Jessie thought: I haven't seen those since the rainy summer when he pretty much gave up gardening and made J. W. Dant his hobby instead.

  His scream began to fade. It was as if someone with a special Remote Gerald Control were turning down his volume. That wasn't it, of course; he had been screaming for an extraordinarily long time, perhaps as long as thirty seconds, and he was just running out of breath. I must have hurt him badly, she thought. The red spots on his cheeks and the swath across his forehead were now turning purple.

  You did! the Goodwife's dismayed voice cried. You really really did!

  Yep; damned good shot, wasn't it? the new voice muse
d.

  You kicked your husband in the balls! the Goodwife screamed. What in God's name gives you the right to do something like that? What gives you the right to even joke about it?

  She knew the answer to that one, or thought she did: she'd done it because her husband had intended to commit rape and pass it off later as a missed signal between two essentially harmonious marriage partners who had been playing a harmless sex-game. It was the game's fault, he would have said, shrugging. The game's, not mine. We don't have to play it again, Jess, if you don't want to. Knowing, of course, that nothing he could offer would ever cause her to hold her wrists up for the handcuffs again. No, this had been a case of last time pays for all. Gerald had known it, and had intended to make the most of it.

  That black thing she had sensed in the room had spun out of control, just as she had feared it might. Gerald still appeared to be screaming, although no sound at all (at least none she could hear) was now coming from his pursed, agonized mouth. His face had become so congested with blood that it actually appeared to be black in places. She could see his jugular vein--or maybe it was his carotid artery, if that mattered at a time like this--pulsing furiously beneath the carefully shaved skin of his throat. Whichever one it was, it looked ready to explode, and a nasty jolt of terror stabbed Jessie.

  "Gerald?" Her voice sounded thin and uncertain, the voice of a girl who has broken something valuable at a friend's birthday party. "Gerald, are you all right?"

  It was a stupid question, of course, incredibly stupid, but it was a lot easier to ask than the ones which were really on her mind: Gerald, how badly are you hurt? Gerald, do you think you might die?

  Of course he's not going to die, the Goodwife said nervously. You've hurt him, indeed you have, and you ought to be sorry, but he's not going to die. Nobody is going to die around here.

  Gerald's pursed, puckered mouth continued to quiver soundlessly, but he didn't answer her question. One of his hands had gone to his belly; the other had cupped his wounded testes. Now they both rose slowly and settled just above his left nipple. They settled like a pair of pudgy pink birds too tired to fly farther. Jessie could see the shape of a bare foot--her bare foot--rising on her husband's round stomach. It was a bright, accusatory red against his pink flesh.

  He was exhaling, or trying to, sending out a dour fog that smelled like rotting onions. That's tidal breath, she thought. The bottom ten per cent of our lungs is reserved for tidal breath, isn't that what they taught us in high school biology? Yes, I think so. Tidal breath, the fabled last gasp of drowners and chokers. Once you expel that, you either faint or ...

  "Gerald!" she cried in a sharp, scolding voice. "Gerald, breathe!"

  His eyes bulged from their sockets like blue marbles stuck in a clod of Play-Doh, and he did manage to drag in a single small sip of air. He used it to speak a final word to her, this man who had sometimes seemed made of words.

  "... heart ... "

  That was all.

  "Gerald!" Now she sounded shocked as well as scolding, an old-maid schoolteacher who has caught the second-grade flirt pulling up her skirt to show the boys the bunnies on her underpants. "Gerald, stop fooling around and breathe, goddammit!"

  Gerald didn't. Instead, his eyes rolled back in their sockets, disclosing yellowish whites. His tongue blew out of his mouth and made a farting sound. A stream of cloudy, orange-tinted urine arced out of his deflated penis and her knees and thighs were doused with feverishly hot droplets. Jessie voiced a long, piercing shriek. This time she was unaware of yanking against the handcuffs, of using them to draw herself as far back from him as possible, awkwardly curling her legs beneath her as she did so.

  "Stop it, Gerald! Just stop it before you fall off the b--"

  Too late. Even if he were still hearing her, which her rational mind doubted, it was too late. His bowed back arched the top half of his body beyond the edge of the bed and gravity took over. Gerald Burlingame, with whom Jessie had once eaten Creamsicles in bed, fell over backward with his knees up and his head down, like a clumsy kid trying to impress his friends during Free Swim at the YMCA pool. The sound of his skull meeting the hardwood floor made her shriek again. It sounded like some enormous egg being cracked against the lip of a stone bowl. She would have given anything not to have heard that.

  Then there was silence, broken only by the distant roar of the chainsaw. A large gray rose was opening in the air before Jessie's wide eyes. The petals spread and spread, and when they closed around her again like the dusty wings of huge colorless moths, blocking out everything for awhile, the only clear feeling she had was one of gratitude.

  2

  She seemed to be in a long, cold hall filled with white fog, a hall that was canted severely to one side like the halls people were always walking down in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street and TV shows like The Twilight Zone. She was naked and the cold was really getting to her, making her muscles ache--particularly those of her back and neck and shoulders.

  I've got to get out of here or I'll be sick, she thought. I'm already getting cramps from the fog and the damp.

  (Although she knew it was not the fog and the damp.)

  Also, something's wrong with Gerald. I can't remember exactly what it is, but I think he might be sick.

  (Although she knew that sick wasn't exactly the right word.)

  But, and this was odd, another part of her really didn't want to escape the tilted, foggy corridor at all. This part suggested that she'd be a lot better off staying here. That if she left she'd be sorry. So she did stay for awhile.

  What finally got her going again was a barking dog. It was an exceedingly ugly bark, bottomheavy but breaking to shrill bits in its upper registers. Each time the animal let go with it, it sounded as if it were puking up a throatful of sharp splinters. She had heard that bark before, although it might be better--quite a bit better, actually--if she managed not to remember when, or where, or what had been happening at the time.

  But at least it got her moving--left foot, right foot, hayfoot, strawfbot--and suddenly it occurred to her that she could see through the fog better if she opened her eyes, so she did. It wasn't some spooky Twilight Zone hallway she saw but the master bedroom of their summer house on the north end of Kashwakamak Lake--the area that was known as Notch Bay. She guessed the reason she had felt cold was that she was wearing nothing but a pair of bikini panties, and her neck and shoulders hurt because she was handcuffed to the bedposts and her bottom had slid down the bed when she fainted. No tilted corridor; no foggy damp. Only the dog was real, still barking its fool head off. It now sounded quite close to the house. If Gerald heard that--

  The thought of Gerald made her twitch, and the twitch sent complex spiral-sparkles of feeling through her cramped biceps and triceps. These tingles faded away to nothing at her elbows, and Jessie realized with soupy, just-waking-up dismay that her forearms were mostly without feeling and her hands might as well have been gloves stuffed with congealed mashed potatoes.

  This is going to hurt, she thought, and then everything came back to her ... especially the image of Gerald doing his header off the side of the bed. Her husband was on the floor, either dead or unconscious, and she was lying up here on the bed, thinking about what a drag it was that her lower arms and hands had gone to sleep. How selfish and self-centered could you get?

  If he's dead, it's his own damned fault, the no-bullshit voice said. It tried to add a few other home truths as well, but Jessie gagged it. In her still-not-quite-conscious state she had a clearer sightline into the deeper archives of her memory banks, and she suddenly realized whose voice--slightly nasal, clipped, always on the verge of a sarcasm-tinged taugh--that was. It belonged to her college roommate, Ruth Neary. Now that Jessie knew, she found she wasn't a bit surprised. Ruth had always been extremely generous with pieces of her mind, and her advice had often scandalized her nineteen-year-old wet-behind-the-ears roommate from Falmouth Foreside ... which had undoubtedly been the idea, or part of it; Ruth's he
art had always been in the right place, and Jessie had never doubted that Ruth actually believed sixty per cent of the things she said and had actually done forty per cent of the things she claimed to have done. When it came to things sexual, the percentage was probably even higher. Ruth Neary, the first woman Jessie had ever known who absolutely refused to shave her legs and her armpits; Ruth, who had once filled an unpleasant floor-counsellor's pillowcase with strawberry-scented foam douche; Ruth, who on general principles went to every student rally and attended every experimental student play. lfall else fails, tootsie, some good-looking guy will probably take his clothes off, she had told an amazed but fascinated Jessie after coming back from a student effort entitled "The Son of Noah's Parrot." I mean, it doesn't always happen, but it usually does--I think that's really what student-written and -produced plays are for--so guys and girls can take off their clothes and make out in public.

  She hadn't thought of Ruth in years and now Ruth was inside her head, handing out little nuggets of wisdom just as she had in days of yore. Well, why not? Who was more qualified to advise the mentally confused and emotionally disturbed than Ruth Neary, who had gone on from the University of New Hampshire to three marriages, two suicide attempts, and four drug-and-alcohol rehabs? Good old Ruth, just another shining example of how well the erstwhile Love Generation was making the transition to middle age.

  "Jesus, just what I need, Dear Abby from hell," she said, and the thick, slurry quality of her voice frightened her more than the lack of feeling in her hands and lower arms.

  She tried to yank herself back up to the mostly-sitting position she had managed just before Gerald's little diving exhibition (Had that horrible egg-cracking sound been part of her dream? She prayed that it had been), and thoughts of Ruth were swallowed by a sudden burst of panic when she did not move at all. Those tingling spirals of sensation spun through her muscles again, but nothing else happened. Her arms just went on hanging above and slightly behind her, as moveless and feeling-less as stovelengths of rock maple. The muzzy feeling in her head disappeared--panic beat the hell out of smelling salts, she was discovering--and her heart kicked into a higher gear, but that was all. A vivid image culled from some long-ago history text flickered behind her eyes for a moment: a circle of laughing, pointing people standing around a young woman with her head and hands in stocks. The woman was bent over like a hag in a fairy-tale and her hair hung in her face like a penitent's shroud.