The Hinky Bearskin Rug (26 page)

Because Steven Tannyhill keeps ducking me,
she pouted.

Maybe she
could be deflected onto this Steven character. “I can’t believe he would refuse
you.”

He
won’t stay in the building long enough for me to get to him. He used to come in
every week, real early in the morning, before the office staff arrived, and
picked up big stacks of magazines from the printing plant. He also bought
pastry. That’s where I got the idea to—

“To poison it.”

She looked
wounded.
To remind him of me. He should
be my avatar. He would love it. Bill Tannyhill loved it. You love it.

“I’m more in
like, I guess I would say.”

Oh, come on, I’m on your wood every
minute. I would know if you didn’t like it.

“My wood isn’t
the smartest part of me,” Clay muttered.

He hated to
admit it, but he was broken. Sometimes a straight question was the only option.

He phoned
Randy’s cell.

Randy answered
on the first ring.

“Why haven’t
you told Jewel about Wilma?” Clay demanded.

“Haven’t you?”
Randy said with amusement in his voice.

Clay had to
call on all his con-artist training to swallow curse words. “Why haven’t you?”

“I’m giving
you enough rope to hang yourself,” Randy said.

“Why should I
trust you?”

“On my honor,”
Randy said. “You have a free hand.”

“Bull,” Clay
said angrily. “You could get rid of me forever if you told her.”

“But I need both
of you to survive in this world,” Randy said. “It is you who will not share.”

Clay snorted. “You’ve
never shared anything in your life.”

After a pause
Randy said, “I think, upon reflection, you’ll realize that I have.”

Clay hung up.

Lena was
putting the finishing touches on a script for Onika when the doorbell rang. She
went to the peephole. Outside, somebody dark hung his head so low that she
couldn’t see his face. He looked up to ring the doorbell again. Randy.

“What in the
world?” She held the door wide. “You have a key.”

He shuffled
in. “I felt we were insufficiently acquainted for me to walk in unannounced.”
His head was still hanging.

He met Jewel and she ripped him a fresh
one.
Lena sighed. If
all the ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends in Chicago were laid end-to-end, she’d
be out of a job.

“Come in and
tell me about it.”

She got him a
glass of wine and sat him on a milk crate. He looked like two cents. “Tell me
what she said.”

He raised
wounded eyes to her face. “You know what we are.”

“No. What are
you? Lovers? Friends?”

“No,” he said,
“you and I.”

She and Randy
had only one thing in common. “She dissed you for acting in porn movies?”

“And for
whoring for two hundred years.” He blinked. “She complains of it often. At
first I thought she must be jealous, but I learned better the night she came
for me at the studio.”

“Uh—” Lena
frowned.

“I gave her
the fantasy she wanted, a fantasy about—”

“Should you be
telling me her fantasy?”

He shrugged. “I
have told women of others’ fantasies before. How else could I learn, if I
didn’t offer them choices?”

Yeah, but you weren’t in love with any
of them.
If he didn’t
get it, maybe he deserved that Jewel had ripped him a fresh one. “Go ahead.”

“She wished to
be in a porn shoot. She pretended to be a novice. I was her director, her
leading man, her crew.”

“Tricky,” Lena
said.

He brushed
that away with two fingers, his eyes elsewhere. “Her understanding of our work —
it was all wrong. Disturbingly wrong. But I had to deliver the fantasy she
wanted.”

“You certainly
do that.”

“A successful
fantasy has a hinge where orgasm becomes possible. The hinge is a moment where
a woman feels ambivalent.”

“Did you find
out why she wanted to be in a porn shoot?”

He swallowed. “Shame.
The hinge was shame.” He covered his face with both hands.

Lena touched
his shoulder. “Seems she isn’t the only one who’s ashamed.” He didn’t move. “Haven’t
you met a lot of women with that hinge?”

He nodded
behind his hands. “I don’t know why it should affect me so, in her case.”

Because you’re in love with her, you
big dumbell.
Lena
resigned herself to a long night. “Tell me about her.”

He drew his
long fingers over his eyes and down his face. Hunkered with his elbows on his
knees and his hands dangling, his white dress shirt open at the throat, his
too-long black hair shaggy around his face, he looked unreally beautiful, like
a fox or a unicorn.

Lucky bitch,
Lena thought.

“She’s
morbidly fearful and astonishingly brave. She throws herself upon the spears of
her enemies and
they
are crushed. What
I have seen her do—” He shook his head, his lip curling. “The man she’s with
now is a coward to his bones. Although, if he can convince himself he has some
hidden advantage, he too can perform prodigies. As if a flimsy secret were his
shield. That will undo him with her. I have only to wait,” Randy said
forlornly.

“You were
telling me about her.”

Lifting his
forefinger, he said, “Let me tell you about the porn shoot fantasy I created
for her.”

Lena rolled
her eyes. “Okay.”

“The hinge was
shame. She had two desires hung upon that hinge. One was the desire to be whole
again, virginal, free of shame.” He shook his head. “If she only knew that she
is
whole! She’s always been whole. She
was involuntarily despoiled in some way. But the despoiler can take from her
only what she believes he can take.
She
is still whole.”

“That’s an odd
idea. I don’t see how that’s possible, but I’m listening.”

“She’s whole,
and yet she feels despoiled. That’s the meaning of her choosing to be a novice
porn actress.”

Lena felt a shiver.

“She walks
into the studio — my lair, as she fancies it — innocently, perhaps by accident.
But the magic of the fantasy holds her. She pretends to herself she’s afraid to
admit that she doesn’t belong. So, to preserve her sense of control, she pretends
she knows what she is doing.”

Randy turned
his dark eyes on Lena. “This is the other side of the hinge. Power. She wants
to be whole, and yet she wants to give up power. She can’t see how she can have
both those things at once. She comes to me.” He shut his eyes. “And I — abuse
her.” His face pinched up.

Lena thought
she understood now. “She wants you to.”

“Yes. At some point in the fantasy she has come to the
limit of her courage, and she needs my help. So I give commands. And, to
preserve the secret that she’s still a virgin, she obeys. Do you see? I have
taken the reins out of her hands. I drive her as I might drive a team of
horses, drive her over the edge of her own self-control.”

“But she isn’t
a virgin.”

“No. She
is.
She
thinks
she is no longer a virgin.” Randy put a hard finger on
Lena’s knee. “Everyone is still a virgin. What is a virgin? Clean, whole,
honest, pure. When is a virgin despoiled? When she feels dirty, broken,
dishonest, as if evil has been stirred into her insides.”

The way I felt when Mom refused to help
me against Steven,
Lena
thought.

“The fantasy
becomes a trap in which she may recapture her virginity. She permits herself to
feel innocent only in the tiny confines of her body, which she has brought to
the studio to be despoiled, so that she may renew her wholeness, her virginity.
Throwing herself on the spear of her enemy.” He shook his head.

Lena followed
all this with difficulty. “She’s doing something that scares her. That seems
brave to me.”

“As I said.”

“So what’s the
problem?”

“When she
wakes from the dream, she’s satisfied, but shame rolls back over her. She can’t
keep it at bay for long. And so she tells herself a lie.
It is the man who made her do these things who should be ashamed.”
Bitterly, he said, “I am he.”

“I see.” Lena felt like spitting. “I hate when people do
that. I could see my mom being hostile to my work. She’s a mom. But if I make
the mistake of telling some guy what I do—”

“He treats you
like a whore,” Randy finished for her. “That is to say, he has an opportunity
to make himself whole by laying his shame upon your back. He can’t even admit
that he mourns his virginity, because he’s a man.”

Lena eyed him.
“You know a lot. You’ve only been in porn a few days.”

He lifted his
head. “I’ve been a sex demon to pious women for two hundred years.”

“Well,
brother, you know the whole song, verse and chorus.” She smiled.

Every inch an
aristocrat, he bowed. “Thank you. It’s an honor to be accepted into the guild.”

Lena peeked at
her watch. “What will you do about Jewel?”

Randy
deflated. “I shall wait.”

Lena snorted. “I
think you’re holding out on her.”

“Holding—?”

“You expect
her to understand you. You think she should know how ashamed you feel. She
should know not to beat you up — she shouldn’t try to make you feel more ashamed.”

Randy’s mouth
fell open. “How can she not know?”

“Uh, duh,
maybe because you don’t tell her?”

“We have been
together every night in what she calls demonspace. This is merely the vast
space inside her mind, but of course she must demonize it, literally, and blame
that on me,” he added grumpily. “My mind is exposed to hers there, just as hers
is to me. We are equals in demonspace.”

“Let me get
this straight.” Lena put up both hands. “You expect her to rummage around in
your brain the way you rummage around in hers.”

“She could, if
she willed.”

“Have you
invited her to poke around in your demonspace?”

He said
nothing.

“You are such
a guy.”

“Mock me if
you choose—”

“Men are so
dense. Number one, you’re mad because nobody has ever rummaged in your head the
way you rummage in our heads. And why is this? I hate to break it to you, but
most of us aren’t looking past the sex, which is great, by the way. Number two,
you are still a lord. You love presenting yourself as a sex demon and you don’t
want your power questioned.”

“I abase
myself every night, providing for her desires, without regard for cost to my
dignity—”

“Do you hear
yourself? Providing for her desires means you have to ‘abase yourself.’ ‘Your
dignity suffers.’ You dork, my co-stars don’t think it’s beneath their dignity
to ‘provide for my desires.’ At least they don’t say so out loud, if they want
to have any wood to work with.” She looked at him with affection. “She’s right.
You’re totally a lord. I think you deserve each other.”

After a stiff
look down his nose, Randy slumped. “I wish she thought so.”

“Have you been
listening to me? Because I’ve been listening to you. On and on and on.”

“I beg your
pardon.” He swallowed. “What should I do?”

“In words of
one syllable? Tell her how you feel.” Every single conversation she had with a
heartbroken guy, she wound up saying the same thing. Why did she bother
listening at all?

And, like
every other heartbroken guy, he answered the same way. “I can’t.”

She got up
from her milk crate. “Okay, bedtime for me. I have church in the morning.”

“Please!” He
caught at her hand. “Advise me.”

Leaning over
his gaunt face and his beautiful, black, heartbroken eyes, she said slowly, “Tell.
Her. How. You. Feel. You gotta show some pink, buddy. Write her a letter, if
you can’t say it out loud.”

“A letter?”
Slowly, he nodded. “I could do that.”

“Don’t tell
her she’s still a virgin, or dump on her for dumping her shame on you. Tell her
what you like about her. Tell her how she makes you feel. A love letter. You
know what that is?”

He swallowed. “I
believe so.”

“Right. Okay.
Nighty-night.” She dropped a kiss on top of his head and crashed out.

He didn’t come
to bed all night. She knew, because if he had, he would have done something
amazing to her, and she would have remembered that.

In the morning
she found a few yellow sheets torn from a legal pad on the kitchen counter.

“What’s this?”

Randy came in
from the shower, rubbing his head with a towel. “My letter to Jewel. You may
read it.”

She really
didn’t have time, but she leaned against the counter and sipped coffee and
read.

Five minutes
later she looked up, a lump in her throat. He was still watching her.

“It’s a good
letter.”

He smiled.

“Now send it.”

“I can’t.”

She put her
cup on the counter and went into the bedroom, handing him the letter as she
passed. “I’m going to church.”