An Emergence of Green (25 page)

“God oh
God
…

As if hypnotized, as if his feet were lead weights dragging him, he returned to the window.

Carolyn’s body was spread-eagled, Val Hunter’s hair a disheveled darkness between her thighs. Val Hunter’s hands were under Carolyn’s hips, slowly rotating them; Carolyn’s head was flinging from side to side, her hands clutching at the bedspread, her breathing like sobs.

“Val...”

Her body stilled, drawing into itself, her shoulders rising, her head bending back between the shoulder blades, clenched fists lifting the spread from the bed. A sound began, was choked off. Her face was a rictus of ecstasy.

The hands released the bedspread; she sank back onto the bed. Val Hunter lay motionless, her face resting on Carolyn’s thigh. She wiped her face on the bedspread as Carolyn reached down for her, groping blindly.

She gathered Carolyn into her arms, rocked her. Carolyn gasped something he could not hear and Val Hunter murmured back indecipherably.

“Yes,” Carolyn uttered. “That. Now.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, stood swaying.

“Beautiful...Val…”

Seemingly of themselves, his eyes opened.

Val Hunter, hugely naked, knelt astride Carolyn’s delicate shoulders. Carolyn’s hands avidly gripped, glided over the white globes of hip; she reached up with both hands to seize with rough eagerness the massive breasts. Her arms circled Val Hunter’s hips, convulsively tightened. Val Hunter’s hands cradled the head between her columns of thigh. Carolyn’s arms pulled Val Hunter down to her. Carolyn’s rigid legs rose slightly from the bed, the toes pointed, the feet quivering.

Val Hunter flung her head back. The powerful hips became undulant. “Carrie,” she moaned, “darling Carrie…”

The words galvanized him into motion. He pulled himself away from the window and strode quickly across the yard.

He sat before the television set in Jerry Robinson’s family room holding a beer, staring at a football game, remembering accounts he had read of people declared clinically dead on the operating table who claimed later that they had hovered over themselves before their vital signs returned. He seemed to be somewhere outside himself, watching as he sat in the Robinson house looking calmly at the TV and speaking normally.

He found himself on his street with no memory of leaving the Robinsons, or of any conversation exchanged with them. He belched the sour taste of beer he could not remember drinking. How long had he been with the Robinsons? He peered at his watch, could not focus on the gold hands. What difference did it make? Val Hunter’s car was still outside his house.

He crossed the street. He paced with long even strides as if he were an automaton, and watched his house. When the front door finally opened he stepped quickly behind the broad peeling trunk of a palm tree.

The figure of Val Hunter shimmered in his vision, outlined in red. He blinked rapidly but still the redness framed her. She strode across the street, her faded jeans riding low on her hips, a manila envelope under her arm.

How she would sneer if she could see him hiding from her. How she must be gloating, he raged as he watched her jaunty stride. She had been laughing at him for months—how she would love to laugh in his face. She—a woman—she had seduced his wife.

He rocked savagely back and forth as he watched her, visualizing her face under the soles of his jogging shoes. He stared unblinkingly as she opened her car door, as she bent to fold her burly body within.

A leviathan, a freak. She was no woman—look at that hard elephant ass on her. Real women were soft, vulnerable. Soft skin, velvet pussies, wonderful soft asses. Men’s asses were flat and solid but a woman’s ass was lush, the epitome of everything soft and vulnerable. She was grotesque—a mutation of a woman.

A vampire. She was a pseudo-woman who seduced real women into her despicable ranks to perform her despicable practices.

Words reverberated through him:
Beautiful…Val…

The tan Volkswagen started with an authoritative roar and moved off down the block, out of sight.

He was pacing again, around his block, around and around. More words:
Yes. That. Now.

A voice, low and resonant:
Carrie…darling Carrie.

A vampire. But she was real, not a legend. She was lethal. Not enough that she had her own kind, she had to corrupt real women, prey on his innocent Princess.

He paced until his calves cramped. Then he opened the front door of his house, holding for a long moment the warm smooth brass door-knob, thinking of Carolyn’s breasts, how tenderly he had always held them.

All l ever did was love you.

She sat in her usual corner of the sofa, a book in her lap. The heavy blonde hair was groomed, the lips lightly lipsticked. The neat pants and shirt were those he had seen in a discarded heap in the yard.

She was looking at him with a puzzled frown. “Jerry was over a few minutes ago looking for you. You had trouble today with his car? What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” He was amazed; his voice was normal. “Nothing important.”

She glanced at the clock over the fireplace. “Where’ve you been? Jerry said you left their house an hour ago.”

An hour? Had it been an hour?
“Walking,” he said. “Thinking.”

“I’ve been thinking too.”

Her voice was cautious, her face turned so that her glance at him was sidelong, a mannerism he knew well. He knew so many things about her so well, her facial expressions, her gestures, the fidgety, intense way she led up to a discussion of anything important to her: all her mannerisms. He had thought he knew her completely.

“Yes,” he said.

“We’ve been having our problems over these past months, Paul.”

The formal use of his name, emphasizing that this issue was of unusual significance. She waited now—as he knew she would—for his reaction to the ball she had lobbed so carefully into his court.

“Yes,” he said, and leaned against the bar.

A minimal return, but sufficient. She said forcefully, “The last thing I want in this world is to go on hurting you. I think…I think a separation would be wise.” She took a deep breath, exhaled.

An image seared his mind: Her body, spread-eagled.

“Wise for both of us, Paul. To give us more breathing space.” A note of pleading came into her voice. “To give us a chance to…get things straightened out. If you’d like us to see a marriage counselor I’d agree to that.”

He shook his head, trying to drive off the images of her. “Tell me something,” he said, and his mind was swept clear as if speaking had been an exorcism. “The whole time we’ve been married, did you ever have an orgasm?”

The words had come from a molten depth. Focused acutely on her, he saw first the shocked glance, then the jaw that dropped almost comically, then the eye-shift. Then heard the words: “What, why—” she blurted, “of course.”

“All the time? Or some of the time?”

“Why are you asking? If you think—”

“You’ve answered the question.” Congratulating himself on the pleasantness of his tone, he smiled.

She frowned; two distinct creases centered between her eyes, “I have
not
answered the question,” she stated. “It’s an impossible question—whatever I say you’ll challenge or take the wrong way. If you could understand that that’s not an issue. Yes, I wish we could have talked…but even so—Paul, if you think my wanting a separation is because of—it’s got nothing to do with—”

He cut in sharply, “What this is all about is the same thing that’s been going on for months. You’d rather be with that Amazon than with me.”

“That’s not true.” Some of the color had left her face.

“It is true. You’d rather be with her than me. You’d rather be with a woman than a man.”

“What I want at this moment is to be by myself.” Her voice was as flat and definite as her statement. “And you’ll soon find out that that’s exactly the truth.”

His head suddenly throbbed fiercely. She had spoken with perfect conviction, as if the evidence of his own eyes, her passionate loving of that creature in a room not a dozen steps from him, were a nonfact. It was the same device she had used these past months to deceive him, confuse him, make him crazy. She had drawn him into a realm of irrationality where lies were made into truth.

The game was over.

He looked at her. The green eyes were veiled, impenetrable. He remembered trying vainly to see into them after lovemaking, to penetrate the barrier that limited, ended intimacy.

Another image flash-froze behind his eyes: Her body arched, her face contorted.

“The truth is,” she said, “I simply want a separation. I’ll do anything I can to—to…”

She looked away from him. Her hands were clenched tightly in her lap, a mannerism he had seen rarely in his marriage, its meaning clear: the finality of her decision.

“I want a separation now,” she said quietly. “I think it’s best.”

THIS IS BEST.

Every woman in his life had defrauded and betrayed him, punished him.

Why?

Why had she abandoned him? Those long evenings away from him. That Saturday she had been gone all day claiming the car had broken down. Months of afternoons to herself because of that job she’d insisted on having. Refusing to let him touch her, making him think it was all his fault. All that time pretending she loved him, when she was in the arms of that…that…All the time that creature was sneering at him, knowing she’d won.

All women were vampires, all of them treacherous, their rules unfathomable. They were all vampires, feeding off him, draining him.

Every last living one of them—even the woman he had chosen as the most precious among women, the woman he had thought would be his Princess forever.

“All I ever did was love you,” he said, and walked toward her, the knowledge of what he would do growing in him, cold and implacable.

As he saw the fear gathering in her, as she shrank back into the sofa cushions, he slowed his pace deliberately, wanting to examine the dimensions of this unexplored power.

Unhurriedly, he reached down for her, pulled her from the sofa by her silk shirt, and with deep satisfaction heard the fabric rend in his hands.

“Paul,” she said in an appalled whisper.

There was a sharp snap of sound; the flesh of her cheek stung his palm. Again there was the snap of sound, and his raised hand threatened her a third time; he would not listen again to that voice saying his name. The voice choked off; the eyes were wide and stunned with shock.

This was her fault. It was her fault she had ever had to know that this was in him.

He flung her backward. Her body glanced off the coffee table, landed heavily on the floor. He lifted her by the shoulders, spun her, propelled her toward the bedroom. She hit the doorframe, fell again.

He picked her up and sent her sprawling across the bed. With her nails clawing at his face he tore the silk blouse into tatters. Seizing her bare shoulders he shook her; her head flopped like a puppet’s head, the blonde hair churning across her face. When he released her she lay limp; but he took her wrists and held them in one hand and clamped her legs down with a knee; and with his free hand proceeded with his task, pulling her pants down over her hips.

In a moment he would be in her; he was hard, stone hard knowing that nothing could stop him, he would do anything he wished, she was helpless beneath him. He unzipped his pants to free his erection. He had never known such power and potency; he would rear like a stallion in her. She had never felt anything from anyone as she would feel him now.

 Her face was contorted from the force of her screams. The image formed of her arched body, that face…The imprinted images flooded him, as if through a rent in his mind. He forced her clothing down to her knees.

He clapped a hand over her mouth and his voice hissed from him: “I saw you today. I saw you I saw you…” He turned her over onto her stomach. “I saw you I saw you I saw you.”

“Paul don’t do this. God oh God—”

The words impaled him: God oh
God.

He plunged into her. A hand clawed back at him. He grasped her wrists again, pulled them around behind her. Hearing her shrill screams, forcing his way into the unyielding flesh tensed in revulsion of him, he yanked her head up by her hair and roared his rage. She
had
to receive him, to
feel
him.

Her face was a hideous mask of horror. He slammed her head down, screaming with the flaming pain that engulfed him, pushing the face and its horror with all his force into the pillow.

“Paul! Paul!”

It was not her voice. There was a piercing, insistent shrill—the doorbell.

“Paul! Brother, what’s going on in there?”
The doorbell shrilled continuously.

Carolyn was limp beneath him. He rolled off her, ripped the pillow away. Her head lolled; she lay utterly still.

“Paul! Answer me, Brother! Do you need me to get help?”

He understood that if he did not answer the door Jerry would call the police. He leaped from the bed, pulling his pants closed, yanking his shirt down as he ran to the front door.