Nothing Is Terrible (27 page)

As I was retying my hiking boots before undertaking the walk to Marmot, that gray, beat-up American car swung into the deserted parking lot. The big former Marine Corps fellow, whose name I decidedly cannot remember now, stopped his car beside me. As far as noticeability of pectorals, this man was on a par with the best and brightest
Playboy
centerfold. In his navy pea coat and white dress shirt, whose top three buttons were unfastened, he displayed a taut, striated cleavage. I saw in his future the kind of physiological corruption and decay that only such exaggerated good health can hint at. Places on his body were muscular that shouldn’t have been, his skull and fingers, for example. In chichi multicultural combat training programs sponsored by the U.S. government, this man had learned eight different systems of sticking hard parts of his body into soft parts of other people’s bodies in order to incapacitate
or damage them, and he was offering me a ride into the dark woods. I declined.

I left the parking lot and walked along a tree-bordered road dimly illumined by streetlamps. The man stayed still in his car in the parking lot. I was relieved to think he was waiting for the next train. Then his car crept out of the parking lot and followed me slowly along the road. Then it pulled up alongside me. He rolled down the window. I continued to walk and he drove his car next to me and looked at me. He made ambiguous comments, sort of innocent-slash-deeply-noninnocent comments such as “Those are nice pants. Are you of Scottish ancestry? Hop in, I won’t hurt you.”

I just want to say quickly here before I get to the ghastly part that these two phenomena are connected, that one could not exist without the other: the violent, frustrated ex-Marine sadist in his car following the solitary girl late at night, and the cheerful family greeting Dad as he steps off the 5:23 out of Manhattan. They go together like a horse and carriage.

I refused his initial offers of a ride, but not because I thought accepting would make it any more likely that he’d do something bad to me; I knew he’d do something bad independent of what I accepted or did not accept. No, I refused as a kind of hopeful planning gesture: I thought I might need, in my future life, if indeed there would be such, the memory of having resisted. And when I accepted his seventh offer of a ride, I did so on the principle that whatever bad thing he was going to do to me would be over with sooner than if I did not accept. Actually, I have no idea why I accepted. He shoved open the passenger side door of his car and I climbed in next to him.

He said, “Where are you going?”

I said, “Where do you think I’m going, dipshit?” There was no principle behind this remark. In fact, this remark can now be declared purely counterproductive.

He said, “I’ve got a cassette player back at the guardhouse. Do you like music?”

“No.”

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Songs that specifically express hatred toward people who work in guardhouses.”

“Sing me one.”

He hit the brakes hard, threw the stick shift into neutral, and applauded so vigorously that he could have crushed the skull of a newborn baby each time he slammed one of his palms with the other.

He started to drive again. “Come on,” he said. “Tell me something about yourself.”

“I like flowers and trees.”

“What else?”

“I just got out of a very intense relationship so I’m feeling kind of fragile.”

“Who were you in the relationship with?”

“Someone kind of like you only much smarter and nicer.”

“Why’d you break up with him?”

“As I said, he was kind of like you.”

“Who has the nicer body, him or me?”

“Him.”

“Who’s stronger, brute strengthwise?”

“Would you shut the fuck up? I hate you.”

He reached inside his coat pocket and pulled out a long knife whose molded handle doubled as brass knuckles. He held the knife between his left hand and the steering wheel as he drove. The little jaw muscle that looked like a small erect penis sheathed under the thin skin of his face began to twitch rapidly. I went to punch him hard in the right ear to break some of the small, delicate bones of his hearing mechanism, but he blocked my punch with his right forearm. He slammed on the brakes again, grabbed me by the wrist with his right hand, and sliced open my palm. “Stay put and don’t insult me. It really hurts when you insult me.”

When we arrived at the guardhouse by the Marmot entrance gate he said, “Reach inside the glove compartment and pass me that roll of duct tape.”

“What do you need duct tape for?”

He punched my arm and I gave him the duct tape. He held me by the wrist and dragged me across the stick shift and out the driver’s door of his car. He shoved me ahead of him into the deserted guardhouse. The guardhouse was about seven feet by seven feet. He pressed me face first against one of the walls and began trying to yank down my pants.

“Can I just say one thing?” I asked.

“What?”

“You won’t be able to do it. Your dick will be limp.”

He uttered a long sort of sigh of frustration and said, “Then
I’ll just have to kill you.” He made it sound as if it would be a very unsatisfying consolation for him. “Come on,” he said, “just cooperate.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. I turned around slowly and caressed his face and kneed him in the testicles as hard as I could.

He punched me in the chest and I sat down on the floor and couldn’t breathe. At around the time he punched me I thought I heard the quiet engine of a European car, but I knew I was hearing what I wished to hear.

“You okay?” the man asked, squatting in front of me. “Come on, be a sport here, won’t you?” He rammed his shoulder into my torso, as if he were a football player and I a tackling dummy. He unzipped my pants, pulled down my thermal underwear, and stared in wonder and dread at my naked crotch. That was when Skip Hartman entered the small guardhouse. “Mr. Hand,” she said. “Please stand up and turn around.” He stood me up and held my throat firmly in his fingers. I could not breathe. He turned his head to look at Skip, pointed the knife at her, and said, “Stay right there.”

“Come to me,” she said.

“What?”

“Come and make love to me. Mary is a child. I am a woman. I know how to love you. I know what you want. I know how to make you feel good.”

“If you try to trick me I’ll slit your fucking throat,” he said.

“Fair enough. Now make love to me.”

He gave my throat one last good-luck squeeze and released me. I fell on the floor. I still could not breathe. He went to Skip Hartman, and she embraced him in the same way that she had often embraced me to realign my back when it was sore. I watched the veins stand out on the skin of her bare forearms
that pressed into his back. She was embracing him with all her might. He could not move. “Hey,” he croaked, “you’re suffocating me. Hey.” I looked at her blank, open-eyed face over his shoulder as she continued to make her arms into a single boa-constrictor sort of appendage and squeezed the hell out of his torso. After a minute, his body went limp. She laid him gently facedown on the floor, pressed one knee into his spine, took the roll of duct tape from the little shelf where he had placed it, and wrapped the tape around his hands behind his back. She taped his feet together and turned his head to the side and placed a piece of tape over his mouth. He stirred then. She lifted him up and sat him in the swivel chair of the guardhouse. He was awake now, and I sensed that he could still have head-butted Skip Hartman and picked up his knife and cut out her entrails, but he didn’t seem to want to. She bound his torso and his thighs to the chair. His face looked peaceful and sad like the face of a child who has just been thrown a loving birthday party but who has failed to receive that one red fire truck that would have made this the perfect day.

“Put a piece of tape over his nose,” I said, sitting on the floor, dressed, bruised.

“Why?”

“To kill him.”

The man did not look at me. He slouched in the chair. Skip stared out the window of the guardhouse with an expression of mild satisfaction, as if she were admiring what an excellent job she had done of parking her car.

“I’ll drive you to the house and give you a glass of wine,” she said to me. She pressed the button that opened the iron gate. She made a small circle of her thumb and forefinger as if making the “okay” sign and flicked the top of the man’s ear with her
forefinger. We left the guardhouse and got in the car and drove into Marmot.

No lights were on in Tommy’s house. She drove the car up the driveway and stopped. “Did he hurt you?” she said.

“I don’t know.” My body had gone numb and I could hardly think or speak. She stood up out of the car and left the door open. She walked rigidly across the wet grass toward the front door, and lost her footing and fell down, and stood up again. She stood still for a moment and looked around in a daze, as if she didn’t know where she was.

She let us into the house. It was empty: no people, no furniture. “Tommy and Myra sold the house,” she said. “For now, they are living in my house in the city. I drove up tonight to be here for the closing tomorrow morning. I have handled the sale of the house because of course I am the only one who knows how to handle these sorts of things without screwing them up. I’m not sure why I decided to drive up tonight instead of tomorrow morning. I had a presentiment. I had a—um. Wine?”

We walked into the kitchen and Skip turned on the light. We stood in the bright, bare kitchen. Her arms and legs were vibrating. She went to a cabinet and removed one of two bottles of Bordeaux. She opened her purse and pulled out a wineglass. “I expected to be alone and did not bring a second glass. I hope you do not mind sharing?”

Her words themselves were a kind of crystal wineglass on a high shelf: sharp and elegant and clear but far away; I could not reach them. She turned off the kitchen light.

“Walk with me, dear, to the living room and we shall sit on the floor together and share wine from this glass.”

We sat in the living room. Faint light from the moon and the neighbors’ electric lamps came through the sliding glass door
at the back of the house. Skip Hartman uncorked the wine with the corkscrew of her Salvation Army knife, poured the red wine into the glass, and, ever the gentleman, offered me the first sip. I stared at it. “Don’t want?” she said. “Very well.” She drained the glass, poured another, offered that; I declined; she drained it again, poured another, drained that.

“Go back and kill him,” I said.

“No.”

“Call the police.”

“He is the police.”

She poured another glass of wine and drank it. The bottle was empty. She stood up and held out her hand. “Come with me. I can’t touch you?” She withdrew her hand. “Come with me. Stay by my side.” I stood. We went to the kitchen. She walked with more fluidity now. In the dark kitchen, she retrieved the other bottle of Bordeaux. We walked back to the living room.

“Everything is fine,” she said, “when you are by my side.” She reached out and tried to stroke my hair but I punched her hand. She stood next to me and watched me in the dim light of the room. A while later, she asked if I would ever let her touch me again.

“Maybe,” I said.

“When?”

“Now.”

“Where?”

“On the cheek.”

“How?”

“With one finger, for three seconds.”

She did just as I said. We sat down. For the record, I was eventually able to express my gratitude to Skip Hartman for
rescuing me, and I believe I expressed it in ways considerate and tender and even erotically satisfying for all concerned, but that night I was too freaked out to express much of anything beyond my extreme freaked-outedness.

Skip opened the new bottle of wine, poured herself a glass, and drank it.

“Where’d you learn to fight?” I said.

“I did not learn.”

“How did you beat him?”

“I think it is a question of urgency of intent: I was fighting for the love of my life, while he was fighting for a lousy fuck.”

“You have to go back and kill him or he’s gonna come after us.”

“No he won’t.”

“Yes he will.”

“You saw him sitting subdued in the chair?”

“Yeah. He looked weird. Quiet.”

“He gave up very quickly and easily, and once he had given up, I believe he was happy, is the way it occurs to me to describe it. What I think I mean is that a kind of peace obtains in the heart of this man now that he has been forcibly prevented from committing his terrible deed. It is over, you see. No more struggle. There may be in his heart some disappointment over not having gotten away with it, but from the beginning of such an endeavor as his, the rapist sees getting away with it as only one of several possibilities of completion, and not necessarily the one most to be desired. In fact,
getting away with it
is hardly to be considered a mode of completion at all, now, is it?
Getting away with it
is, frankly, nothing more than an extended period of uncertainty during which the rapist must wonder continuously,
Did I get away with it?
That is, as I say, hardly the
state of affairs of completion. That is the state of affairs of
ongoingness
. Furthermore, it must be said that only someone with the sturdiest emotional makeup should consider
getting away with it
as a realistic goal for rape. And perhaps it need not be added that the rapist almost by definition is not made of the sturdiest emotional stuff.”

“You oughtta know.”

“Yes, that also need not be added and yet you have seen fit to add it. I oughtta know. I oughtta know and I do know. I do know because I oughtta know. I always do what I oughtta do. Where was I? Oh, yes, I believe I was saying that
getting away with it
requires extraordinary mental stamina against doubt and self-hatred;
getting away with it
calls upon inexhaustible reserves of patience.
Getting away with it
is the most attenuated form of delayed reward I can think of. In terms of attenuation I rank it above getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature, or even having an interest-bearing savings account at a neighborhood bank.
Getting caught
, by contrast, is easy, simple, quick, and gratifying.”