Lunch (10 page)

“No.”

“Let me go.” She is struggling, gasping for breath, he has been waiting for this, for her to struggle back to life, to fight him, her body squirming under him in indescribable pleasure.

He is still laughing, biting her breasts. He is too strong, he has both her arms pinioned hard, too hard, with one hand like a band of steel, the other caressing her as her legs flail helplessly till he pins them with his own in a scissors grip. She is helpless, totally helpless, that delirious helplessness that is opium to his fevered senses, swirling into his brain, intoxicatingly uncontrollable. It is what he lives for, this oblivion, this craving, what he wants for himself and for her to feel, this power, to take, keep taking, she will cry out, she will beg and plead and moan, she is his, his prisoner in bed, absolutely defenseless.

Olivia will not capitulate quite so easily, he knows, he teases and torments, he wants her to fight him, because every time she does, he will shudder with the pleasure of forcing her to submit.

“Mine,” he says, “mine.”

Her legs are pushed up around his neck, he is insatiable, it is too much, it is unbearable.

She knows he wants to hear her scream.

It is easier to drown. Her eyes close, and she gives in, utterly.

S
HE HEARS
ticking, her arm still above her head, no longer pinioned. Her watch. It is not yet one. Less than an hour. It cannot be.

Nick is propped on one elbow, watching her, smiling tenderly at her. Olivia.

A tear trickles down her cheek, she can't help it. He kisses her gently.

She lies there, deep in the down comforter and Porthault sheets, watching as Nick disappears into the loo, she hears water running. She closes her eyes, too dazed to move, and does not hear him till she feels a cool wet cloth, perfumed with lavender, between her legs, around her breasts, at her nape, his hands gently turning her over to trail down her back. A brush slowly pulled through her tangled curls. She still cannot speak, it is too new.

It is too terrifying.

Without a word Nick gathers her jumbled clothes and dresses her as if she were his child, she cannot move herself, she sits, numb, as Nick throws on his clothes and rims his fingers through his hair.

“Come,” he says. “M will take you home. I came on my bike.”

That is my cue to turn off the equipment, shut off the lights, and hurry down to the car.

“Olivia,” Nick says, tilting up her chin. “I can't wait three weeks to see you again. I won't.”

She shakes her head, still dumb.

“Promise me.” His lips on hers, sweet, his lips, harder, insistent, pushing her back down into the comforter, sinking, if she stays down there she will drown. “Promise me. I won't let you go till you tell me when.”

She cannot think. Where is she what has she done what day is it why is she here, dizzy and drowning. What has he done to her. His lips, bruising, biting hers.

“Tomorrow,” he says.

She shakes her head, no, it is too soon, it is unthinkable, she cannot breathe.

“Thursday.”

No. Today must be Tuesday, this is London, she is in a flat near Porchester Square, she is sinking, down, deep down into a place where she should not be. Nick is kissing her. She is kissing him back, she can't help it, she can't help herself, there is no one to save her except herself.

“Friday,” he says.

“Friday.” A whisper.

“Same time. Here.”

She nods.

“You promise.”

She nods again.

“Your solemn word.”

“Yes.”

He scoops her in his arms, carried softly like a baby down the stairs into the car where I am waiting. He does not say goodbye. The door slams. She cannot think. Cars flash by, trees, the sun in her eyes, no, wait, it is raining, there is a storm, there must be, because she hears a roaring in her ears.

“Olivia.” I am shaking her gently. Her eyes blink, focus on me in confusion. “You're home.”

She looks out the window, and awakens. She bursts out laughing, to my surprise.

“What happened?” she asks, not expecting an answer.

“Friday,” I say. “Do you want me to pick you up?”

She shakes her head. She will be there.

She promised.

S
HE DISAPPEARS
into the house. She will run a bath, I imagine, she will lounge back in steaming warm bubbles, soothing her aching limbs, tracing with much disbelief the vivid bruises blooming like hothouse peonies on her pale skin, wondering why she cannot remember the very instant that Nick's fingers kneaded her breasts so roughly to leave such violent fingerprints like squares on a crossword, or when her wrists became ringed with cuffs of blue and ocher. Cerulean blue and Indian yellow, she decides, colors, that is all she can think about, colors, as the burning heat between her legs slowly diminishes to a slow steady ache.

How could she have done what she did?

It doesn't matter. She drowned, and he brought her back to life in an enchanted room, his Frankenstein creating another creature, a siren calling, luring him to his doom, her voice sweetly enticing, he will hear it, and come, and they will both drown together.

Three days till Friday.

 

Chapter 9

T
ell me about your boyfriends,” he says, sweat-­glued to her, his fingertips doodling up and down her back, suffused with lazy passion. The intense ease of their coupling makes him want to be nice. He is trying harder than he's ever tried to be nice, to restrain the urges that have been permitted him for so long. This is Olivia. She doesn't want to talk about herself but he wants to know, and this is how she'll tell him.

The cameras are rolling, noiseless. I am watching.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Everyone.”

Olivia swats him, playful. “How many do you think there've been?”

“A lucky dozen or two.”

“Is that all?” She laughs. “Of course, in comparison to you, I must seem positively virginal.”

Nick rolls away and lights up a cigarette. His eyes narrow as he exhales, and she frowns. He stubs it out. How much can I tell her now? he wonders. He looks in the mirror.

“No one else matters.”

“Not even Belinda?”

He lies back, smiling. “How do you know about Belinda?”

She shrugs. Annette told her, suppressing a smile at the curiosity Olivia did not want to acknowledge. Nick is staring at her, intently. He doesn't want her to know. To know anything of the life that exists outside this room.

“Tell me about your boyfriends,” he says again.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes,” he says. “Everything.”

“When I lived in New York, before I went to Chicago, I used to go running in the park,” she tells him, her voice dreamy with memory, Belinda forgotten, “running in the summer, around the reservoir, when the stinky-­sweet smell of the leaves and the undergrowth made me dizzy. There were weeds, and prying eyes hidden in them, and their rotting smell even in the heat of summer made me lose my pace, and so sometimes I'd mix colors on a palette in my head as I ran, the water Payne's Gray and the sky Stephenson's Blue and Rose Madder for the windows on Fifth Avenue, or Cadmium Red Light, and then all the colors blurred together and became the same shade as the stones crunching beneath my feet. I crushed them all, those colors.”

Nick is fascinated, her voice singsongy, faraway.

“Or I'd write letters in my head, as I ran, letters to old boyfriends, and I could never remember if I put them to paper and mailed them or not, but fragments stayed in my head,” she says, “and sometimes I'd dream them, and if the dreams were vivid enough they gave me ideas to paint.”

“Like what?” he says.

“Like the man in black.
The Birthday Present,
I called it. I painted him as a centaur.”

“Who was he?”

“I met him at a party. An Italian, Robertino, his name was. It was a going-­away party, and I was frosting the cake, for some reason,” she says. “He was watching me, dressed all in black. He had this lazy look around his mouth like those spoiled by unearned wealth. I know that look, it really bugs me.” She sighs, and sits up, hugging her knees. “He stood there, staring at me, and when I asked him what he wanted he said: ‘Come home with me—­tomorrow is my birthday.' ”

“And did you?”

“No. Not then, at least. He was a photographer, and he was always off somewhere on assignment. He sent me scarabs from Egypt, and paprika from Prague, loose in the envelope, so it stained my fingers when I opened it, and once, a funny lumpy package, and when I opened it dozens of rose petals came fluttering out. He was very strange.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don't know. He only needed me when he was on the other side of the world.”

“How could he leave you?” Nick says, pulling her back down. “Tell me another.”

“Once,” she says, trailing her hand lightly up and down the arm he's wrapped around her, “once I was in a club downtown, oh, this was many years ago. As you walked in there was a horseshoe-­shaped bar and a crowd of ­people waiting for a drink and the deejay at the far end, wearing headphones like a tiara, and the dance floor was behind her. She liked old-­fashions. Everyone else was shooting up or snorting or smoking in the bathrooms.”

“But not you.”

“No, not me. I was Miss Pure and Proper.”

He laughs. “I bet.”

“No, honestly. I didn't need anything. I'd never've been able to work if I'd done them. Drugs interfered with my pleasure, believe it or not. I wanted to remember.”

“You mean you wanted to be in control.”

She shrugs.

“I was standing at the bar,” she goes on, “waiting for a glass of water. There was a feather in my pocket and I was waving it idly under my nose, listening to my friend Charlie talking the usual nonsense, I don't remember. I looked straight across the bar and saw this man staring at me. His left arm was in plaster, and there was something about his cast that turned me on. It glowed as if it were a living thing, phosphorescent, and I felt this overwhelming, perverse desire to pick it up, feel its heft in my fingers, to touch
it,
not his warm, real flesh underneath.

“We stared at each other for a while, and then he smiled and pointed to his glass. I left Charlie and maneuvered around to him. ‘What happened to your arm?' I asked. ‘Oh,' he said, ‘I fell on some concrete and broke my thumb and part of my wrist.'

“I said I had to touch it. I did. It wasn't smooth, it was rough and chunky and white, radiant white. I lifted it gingerly, his whole arm. It weighed much more than I thought. ‘Does it hurt?' I asked.

“ ‘Yes,' he said. ‘The weight of it.'

“ ‘You're so little,' I told him. He was. Wiry. Intense.

“ ‘I lost weight. It hurt too much to eat.' He laughed. ‘I can't believe we're discussing my waistline at the bar.'

“ ‘I'm sure that's what you come here for.'

“ ‘No,' he said. ‘I like to watch. Watch the faces here.' ”

Nick is laughing.

The laugh is intended for me. I can smell his arousal. “No wonder he turned you on,” he tells her.

“No, it was the cast,” Olivia says. “And then he said: ‘You know, you're not so strange up close as you are from a distance.' That's why I still remember this, not because he was a boyfriend or anything, but because he said that. Then I asked him what he did.

“ ‘I'm a gravedigger,' he tells me, and sees the look on my face. ‘But only for the money. I'm really a filmmaker.'

“ ‘Are you? Do you shoot them in cemeteries?'

“ ‘Nah,' he said. ‘Too morbid.'

“We stood there for a moment. The music faded away. I wanted him, I wanted the feel of that cast on top of me.

“ ‘You have scary eyes,' he said, ‘but they're not as scary now that you're by me as they were when I first saw you.' He smiled. ‘I think I want your phone number.'

“I stared at his cheekbones, as alabaster as the plaster. I wanted to pick up his cast and smash it on the counter.”

“Did you?” Nick asks, delighted.

“No. No, I didn't.”

“Did he call you?”

Olivia is staring at the ceiling. “No. No, he didn't.”

“He was a fool,” Nick says, pulling her close. “Who wouldn't want you?”

I wonder. Olivia does not fit. She is an outcast from the fields of beauty plucked and harvested by Nick with such blasé regularity. He, whose implacable requirement of ravishing statuesque proportions untethered by character made the procuring too easy and too boring, would never have looked twice at this woman in other circumstances.

But in this room as it is now, the drapes drawn against the day and illuminated only by the light of candles flickering across her face, her hair seeming to me, through the lens, not dissimilar to a writhing mass of Medusa's coils, she resembles a strange goddess, a ripe figure, curved and rounded, sound of stature, sound of spirit, and made for love.

“Him, obviously,” she is saying. “He didn't want me. But sometimes when I shut my eyes I can still see that cast.”

“Maybe you should paint it, now. Again.”

“Maybe. But what I have to paint is sitting in my studio right now, so let me go.”

“Stay. Just one more minute.”

“All right.” She snuggles close to him. “Now you tell me a story.”

He sighs, and waits a moment before starting to speak.

“I was with some kids I knew, and we went to a farm. We were drunk.” He entangles his hands in her hair, caressing her head.

“When was this?” she asks.

“I don't know. A long time ago. It doesn't matter.” He stiffens, imperceptibly. “I saw a huge rock, with a rope tied around it, near the edge of a well, and those guys said I couldn't lift it.” His hands whirling, harder, hair bunched in his fingers, flowing through, helplessly.

She shivers.

“So I picked it up and I carried it over to the well and I threw it in.” He starts to laugh. “And then all of a sudden this goat comes tearing around the corner, screaming, bleating, and there's a rope tied around his neck and I think oh no and before I can do anything the poor little mother is down the well.”

“You mean you couldn't get it out?”

“How was I supposed to know? Stupid goat.”

“So it died.”

He buries his face in her hair.

“You let it die, just like that. It's the most revolting thing I've ever heard.”

“No, it isn't.”

She ignores him. “Then what did you do?”

“We ran. We ran like hell.” He reaches down to the wetness between her legs. “So this is what turns you on?”

“No,” she says, trying to push his fingers away. “That is a horrible story. You are a monster.”

He won't let her go, kissing her, gently, till she stills.

“Would you like a rope around your neck, and a little bell for the shepherdess to find you?” she says, placated, ready to tease him once more. “Would you like me to chase you across that field with my staff and throw you down the well? It's what you deserve.”

“Go ahead. I dare you.”

“Would you like me to tie you to the post in the barn and run a comb through your coat because it's all tangled from running through the fields?” He has let go of her arms and she is stroking his legs, her nails leaving white traces as she caresses him slowly. “Would you like that, you horrid nasty little beast?”

“Do it,” he says.

“Monster,” she says.

“Yes,” he says, “yes.”

“You are thoughtless, and cruel, and that poor little goat is dead because you had to prove how strong you are.”

“Do you know how strong I am?”

“Show me.”

He shows her.

He shows me, too, what he can do, and though I've seen the motions countless times already, I've never before watched with such a gnawing compulsion of my own, unable to tear my eyes away, not from Nick's smooth and sensual performance, but from the conflicting emotions racing across Oliv­ia's face like clouds blown swiftly across a sky, she oblivious to her own bewilderment, fear, and the thrilling shock of sexual enthrallment even in the very instant she feels it.

This must be akin to what she sees when she is painting. For her, then, time slows, and its effects are prolonged, lingering, cumulative, and controllable.

For me, here, watching in a tiny room, time is traveling with such speed that I cannot slop to wonder why it hurts so much to breathe.