Festival of Fear (16 page)

They had met when Melanie was sent to interview pro football players about their private lives. Her first question had been, ‘What kind of girls appeal to you the most?' and without blinking David had answered, ‘You.'

David and Melanie shared a ground-floor apartment in a large, white-painted house in a street in Ashwaubenon lined with sugar maples. David drove a blue Dodge pickup and Melanie had a new silver Volkswagen Beetle. The evening after David brought Echo home, Melanie was sitting on the front veranda on the swing seat, with Echo in her lap, while David went jogging.

It was one of those evenings in late August when the moths patter against the lamps and the chilly dew begins to settle on the lawn and you can feel that somewhere in the far north-west, Mr Winter is already sharpening his cutlery.

Mr Kasabian came down from the first-floor apartment to put out the trash. He looked like Gepetto, the puppet-maker who had carved Pinocchio, with a yard-brush moustache and circular eyeglasses and a black shiny vest. When he saw Echo dancing in Melanie's lap he climbed up on to the veranda to take a closer look.

‘Cute little fellow.'

‘Girl, actually. David brought her home yesterday.'

‘Reminds me of my Wilma,' said Mr Kasabian, wistfully. ‘My Wilma used to love her cats.'

‘You must miss her so bad.'

Mr Kasabian nodded. ‘It'll be three years this November twelfth, but believe me it's still a shock when I wake up in the morning and I put out my hand and find that she's not there any more.'

‘I don't know what I'd do if I lost David.'

‘With the grace of God you won't have to think about that until you've both lived a long and happy life.'

Mr Kasabian went back inside, and just then David appeared around the corner in his green-and-white tracksuit, his Nikes slapping on the sidewalk. ‘Thirty-one minutes eighteen seconds!' he gasped, triumphantly. He came up on to the veranda and gave her a kiss.

‘You're so
sweaty
!' she said.

‘Sorry – I'll hit the shower. Do you want to get me a beer?'

‘No,' she said, and clung on to his tracksuit. ‘Come here, I
love
you all sweaty.'

He kissed her again and she licked his lips and his cheeks and then she ran her fingers into his hair and pulled him closer so that she could lick the sweat from his forehead.

‘Hey – beats the shower,' said David, kissing her again and again.

She tugged open his zipper and buried her face inside his tracksuit, licking his glistening chest.

‘Come on inside,' she said, picking up Echo and taking hold of his hand.

In the living room, she pulled off his tracksuit top and licked his shoulders and his back and his stomach. ‘I love the taste of you,' she said. ‘You taste like salt and honey, mixed.'

He closed his eyes. His chest was still rising and falling from his running.

She guided him over to the couch so that he could sit down. She unlaced his Nikes and peeled off his sports socks. Kneeling in front of him she licked the soles of his feet and slithered her tongue in between his toes, like a pink seal sliding amongst the rocks. Then she untied the cord around his waistband and pulled down his pants, followed by his white boxer shorts.

While he lay back on the couch she licked him everywhere, all around his sweaty scrotum and deep into the crevice of his buttocks. She wanted every flavor of him, the riper the better. She wanted to own the taste of him, completely.

And that was how it started.

Every night after that they would tongue-bathe each other all over, and then lie in each other's arms, breathing each other's breath, their skins sticky with drying saliva. Every night he would bury his face between her thighs, licking her and drinking her, and she would suck his glans so hard that he yelped in pain. When he did that, Echo would mew, too.

One night, eleven days later, he lifted his head and his chin was bearded in scarlet. He kissed her, and she licked it off his face, and then he dipped his head down for more.

Melanie's parents took them out for dinner at MacKenzie's Steak and Seafood. They sat close to each other, their fingers twisted together, staring at each other in the candlelight.

Her father looked at her mother after a while and raised one eyebrow. He was a lean, quiet-spoken man with brushed-back silver hair and a large, hawklike nose. Her mother looked almost exactly like Melanie, except her hair was bobbed short and highlighted blonde and her figure was fuller. She was wearing a bright turquoise dress, while Melanie was all in black.

‘So . . . do you two lovebirds have any plans to get married yet?' asked Mr Thomas. ‘Or is that me being old-fashioned?'

‘I think we're past getting married,' said Melanie, still smiling at David.

‘
Past
getting married? What does that mean?'

‘It means that we're much, much closer than any wedding ceremony could make us.'

‘I'm sorry, I don't get it.'

Melanie turned to her father and touched his hand. ‘You and Mom were so lucky to find each other . . . But sometimes two people can fall in love so much that they're both the same person . . . they don't just share each other, they
are
each other.'

Her father shook his head. ‘That's a little beyond me, I'm afraid. I was just wondering if you'd considered the financial advantages of being married.' He grunted, trying to make a joke of it. ‘Huh – I don't exactly know what tax breaks you two can expect from being the same person.'

Their meals arrived. They had all chosen steak and lobster, apart from Melanie, who had ordered a seared-tuna salad. Their conversation turned to the football season, and then to the latest John Grisham novel that Melanie's father had been reading, and then to one of Melanie's friends from
MidWest
magazine, who had been diagnosed with cervical cancer at the age of twenty-six.

‘She wants her ashes spread on her vegetable patch, would you believe, so that her boyfriend will actually eat her.'

‘I think that's so morbid,' said Melanie's mother.

‘I don't. I think it's beautiful.'

David poured her another glass of white wine. ‘How's your tuna?'

‘It's gorgeous. Do you want to try some?'

‘No, that's OK.'

‘No, go on, try some.'

With that, she leaned across and kissed him, ostentatiously pushing a half-masticated wad of fish into his open mouth. David took it, and chewed it, and said, ‘Good. Yes, you're right.'

Melanie's parents stared at them in disbelief. David turned to them unabashed. ‘It's really good,' he confirmed, and swallowed.

The next day Melanie's mother phoned her at work.

‘I'm worried about you.'

‘Why? I'm fine. I've never been so happy in my life.'

‘It's just that your relationship with David – well, it seems so
intense
.'

‘That's because it
is
intense.'

‘But the way you act together . . . I don't know how to say this, really. All this kissing and canoodling and sharing your food. Apart from anything else, it's embarrassing for other people.'

‘Mom, we love each other. And like I said to Dad, we're not just partners, we're the same person.'

‘I know. But everybody needs a little space in their lives . . . a little time to be themselves. I adore your father, but I always enjoy it when he goes off for a game of golf. For a few hours, I can listen to the music I want to listen to, or arrange flowers, or talk to my friends on the phone. I can just be
me
.'

‘But David
is
me. The same way that I'm David.'

‘It worries me, that's all. I don't think it's healthy.'

‘Mother! You make it sound like a disease, not a relationship.'

October came. David started to miss practice at Lambeau Field and Melanie began to take afternoons off work, simply so that they could lie naked on the bed together in the wintry half-darkness and lick each other and stare into each other's eyes. Their greed for each other was insatiable. When they were out walking in the cold, and Melanie's nose started to run, David licked it for her. In the privacy of their own bedroom and bathroom, there was nothing that they wouldn't kiss or suck or drink from each other.

They visited their parents and their friends less and less. When they did, they were no company at all, because they spent the whole time caressing each other, deaf and blind to everybody and everything else.

One afternoon when it was beginning to snow, the Packers' assistant head coach Jim Pulaski came around to their apartment. He was a squat man with bristly gray hair and a broad Polish-looking face, deeply lined by years of standing on the touchline. He sat on the couch in his sheepskin coat and warned David that if he missed one more practice he was off the team. ‘You're a star, David, no question. But the cheeseheads are more important than the stars, and every time you don't show up for practice you're letting the cheeseheads down.' ‘Cheeseheads' was the nickname that the Packers gave their supporters.

Without taking his eyes off Melanie, David said, ‘Sorry, coach? What did you say?'

‘Nothing,' said Mr Pulaski, and after a long while he stood up, tugged on his fur-lined hat, and let himself out of the front door. As he crunched across the icy driveway out he met Mr Kasabian struggling in with his shopping bags. He took one of them and helped him up the porch steps.

‘Thanks,' said Mr Kasabian, his breath smoking in the cold. ‘I'm always afraid of falling. At my age, you fall, you break your hip, they take you to hospital, you die.'

‘You live upstairs?'

‘That's right. Twenty-seven years this Christmas.'

‘You see much of David and Melanie?'

‘I used to.'

‘Used to?'

‘Not these days. These days,
pfff
, they make me feel like the Invisible Man.'

‘You and everybody else.'

Mr Kasabian nodded toward the green Toyota parked at the curb with
Green Bay Packers
lettered on the side. ‘David's in trouble?'

‘You could say that. We're going to have to can him unless he gets his act together. Even when he
does
show up for practice he's got his head up his ass.'

‘Mister, I don't know what to tell you. I was in love with my wife for thirty-eight years but I never saw two people like this before. This isn't just smooching, this is like some kind of hypnotized hypnosis. If you ask me, this is all going to turn out very, very bad.'

Mr Kasabian stood in the whirling snow and watched as the coach drove away. Then he looked back at the light in the downstairs window and shook his head.

Three days before Christmas, Echo went missing. Melanie searched for her everywhere: in the cupboards, behind the couch, under the cushions, down in the cellar. She even went outside and called for her under the crawl space, even though Echo hated the cold. No Echo. Only the echo of her own voice in the white, wintry street. ‘Echo!
Echo
!'

When David came back from the store she was sitting in her rocking chair in tears, with the drapes half-drawn.

‘I can't find Echo.'

‘She has to be someplace,' he said, picking up cushions and newspapers as if he expected to find her crouching underneath.

‘I haven't seen her all day. She must be so hungry.'

‘Maybe she went out to do her business and one of the neighbors picked her up.'

They knocked on every door on both sides of the street, all wrapped up in their coats and scarves. The world was frigid and silent.

‘You haven't seen a tortoiseshell kitten, have you?'

Regretful shaking of heads.

Right at the end of the street, they were answered by an elderly woman with little black darting eyes and a face the color of liverwurst.

‘If I hev, den vot?'

‘You've seen her? She's only about this big and her name's Echo.'

‘There's a reward,' David put in.

‘Revord?'

‘Fifty dollars to anybody who brings her back safe.'

‘I never sin such a kitten.'

‘You're sure?'

‘She's of . . . great sentimental value,' Melanie explained. ‘Great
emotional
value. She represents – well, she represents my partner and me. Our love for each other. That's why we have to have her back.'

‘A hundred dollars,' said David.

‘Vy you say hundert dollar?'

‘Because – if you've seen her – if you
have
her—'

‘Vot I say? I tell you I never sin such a kitten. Vot does it matter, fifty dollar, hundert dollar? You tell me I lie?'

‘Of course not. I didn't mean that at all. I just wanted to show you how much we'd appreciate it if you
did
have her. Which, of course, you don't.'

The woman pointed her finger at them. ‘Bad luck to you to sink such a bad sing. Bad luck, bad luck, bad luck.'

With that, she closed the door and they were left on the porch with snow falling silently on their shoulders.

‘Well,
she
was neighborly,' said David.

They searched until eleven o'clock at night, and one by one the houses in the neighborhood blinked into darkness. At last they had to admit that there was no hope of them finding Echo until morning.

‘I'll make some posters,' said Melanie, lying on her stomach with her nightshirt drawn to her armpits, while David steadily licked her back.

‘That's a great idea . . . we could use one of those pictures that we took of her on the veranda.'

‘Oh, I feel so sorry for her, David . . . she's probably feeling so cold and lost.'

‘She'll come back,' said David. ‘She's our love together, isn't she? That's what she is. And our love's going to last for ever.'