Punish Me with Kisses (21 page)

They got into bed, and he made love to her very gently, doing everything he could to please her so she would know that no matter what he'd said it wasn't sex that held him to her, but love. When they were finished and had turned off the lights, she lay on her back and tried to sleep. But she couldn't. So many things were whirling through her mind. She turned to him and finally whispered in his ear.

"What was she like?" she asked. "What was she really like?"

"Suzie?"

"Uh-huh."

"You knew her a lot better than me."

"I mean—you know: what was she like in bed?"

"Jesus, babe." He propped himself up so he could look at her. "I don't know. Jesus. I can't remember that."

"Come on," she coaxed him. "You can remember if you try."

"There's no way to describe something like that. It was so long ago. What difference does it make?"

"I'd like to know."

He shook his head. "I want to forget it. I want to forget what she was like." He turned his back, then fell off to sleep.

Either he really couldn't remember, or couldn't bring himself to tell. In either case she was annoyed. What use was he if he couldn't tell her the things she wanted to know?
Jamie
Willensen
would tell me
, she thought,
if I could ever get close enough to ask
.

J
amie and I had a deal. If he satisfied my fantasy, I'd satisfy his. His is complicated, baroque, reeking of
faggy
S&M. But hearing him tell it gives me a charge. Humiliation—maybe that's my game!

The scenario is set. We go to The Underground on West Street Saturday night. The place is jammed, people staring, tittering. Slave masks hang from the ceiling. Rubber underwear. Leather jockstraps. Vibrator kits.
Dildoes
in assorted sizes. Lotions, creams, a whole wall of bondage devices, another of paddles and whips, a chart showing the "handkerchief code." Three skinny guys in T-shirts are waiting on the mob. Everyone very polite, very proper and correct. Merchandise is ordered in hushed tones. Items purchased are handed over in discreet black paper bags.

"Can I help you?" asks one of the salesmen.

"Yes," I say, loud enough for everyone to hear. "I'm interested in looking at male genital restraints."

"Ah—" He leads us over to a counter where all sorts of wicked-looking gadgets are displayed.

"I like that one," I say, pointing to a mean-looking gismo, all black leather and chrome studs. The salesman pulls it out. "Do you think this will fit you, sweets?" I ask, giving Jamie a withering look By now the entire store is silent. You can cut their fascination with a knife. Jamie shrugs, embarrassed. "Looks like it might be a little small," I say. Then to the clerk: "He's hung like a horse—can you BELIEVE it? Well, the tighter the better I suppose. Twenty-four hours in that ought to teach him who's the boss."

I snap my fingers. Jamie, blushing to his ears, fishes out his wallet, forks over twenty bucks. "No need to wrap it," I tell the salesman. "It's going on him the minute we get home." The salesman, I'm certain, has a hard-on. The women are incredulous. A young college couple examines us as we turn around.

"Yes," I say as we leave the shop, "twenty-four hours cinched up tight as I can—then you'll REALLY be sorry for what you did."

Out on the street: "God, you're dynamite," he says.

"Get your charge, sweets?"

"Did I ever."

"Shall we go back and buy a pair of clamps to torture your little nips?"

He's on fire now—I can tell. Back on Seventh Avenue I feel his crotch, find him hard as steel. "You really are an M," I tell him.

"Yes," he says. "Oh, yes!"

For a week we play out the charade. He gets more and more into it—I less and less. Finally when he asks me to beat him with a riding crop, I scornfully refuse. "Get one of your numbers to do that for you," I say. "Go to a leather-bar. I resign my role as Queen."

He's crestfallen, and I'm glad. All this kinky stuff leaves me cold. I loathe my brassy wise-ass act, my good-time-outrageous-bitch routine. I long so much for tender love, to be held and cuddled, the great strong chest to weep upon, to cling to in the night—

A
fter Jared's refusal to describe what Suzie was like in bed, Penny decided to keep her thoughts about Suzie to herself. They were her problem, her obsession—no reason to bother Jared with them anymore. She carried the diary in her purse, brought it out at odd moments, reread certain passages again and again. She didn't know why it obsessed her except that by telling her about Suzie it seemed also to be telling her about herself. Why had they been so different? What had made their lives diverge? She believed that if she studied the diary hard enough the answers would be revealed.

The tantalizing mystery now, she thought, was why Suzie had lived the way she had, as if she'd been controlled by something, driven by some controlling power. As for their sisterly relationship, the more she thought about it the more convinced she became that beneath her own bookishness and voyeurism there was a lot of Suzie, too.

She didn't know why she thought this. It wasn't clear. Sex—that was part of it; she thought about sex a lot now, sometimes for hours at a time, and had begun to fantasize in ways she'd never done before. She thought about seeing Jared in one of his porno films, wondered what she'd feel if she saw him big on the screen, naked, savagely screwing someone else. And then she began to think about seeing that in real life: a threesome, a foursome, an orgy, with lots of faceless men and Jared, too, and herself, of course, being screwed by all of them, taking them on one at a time and then by twos and threes.

Maybe she and Jared should go to one of the swingers' clubs. He knew people who held sex parties—they should go to one of them. It seemed peculiar to her that she should be thinking things like this, and when she hinted to Jared what she had in mind, he said he found it peculiar, too. "That's not you," he told her, shaking his head. But then, later, she wondered:
If these are the things I think about, if these are my fantasies, then they must be me.

Another thing that struck her in the diary were those points where Suzie's life had intersected with her own. That dinner in Greenwich when Suzie had said she found her reading list "jejune"; that time when they were little and their father had spanked Suzie for knocking down her blocks. She barely remembered those things, but reading about them brought them back. Differently, of course—her own memory of the jejune incident was so vague she could only remember the sting of her tears as she stared at the toppled blocks.

Suzie wrote odd things about her: "I want to grab her by her ears and shake her till she pees"—"I sometimes wonder if Child will ever get her shit together." But there was a strain of tenderness, too, a concern for "Child," a hope that "Child" wouldn't suffer the way she had. There was a cryptic reference to a conversation about Scott Fitzgerald they'd had once driving up to Maine. She remembered it as a casual bit of talk, but Suzie evidently had found it intense:

—listening to her chatter I feel like flirting with danger, skirting close up to the edge. Child sniffs at "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me." Thinks Fitz got Tom and Daisy Buchanan all wrong, too, with his accusation that they "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." Finds Baby Warren's final dismissal of Dick Diver ("That's what he was educated for") implausible. "Fitzgerald never really understood," she says. "We ought to know, don't you think? We're rich and not like that at all." She talks on and all the time I'm touched and moved and also screaming wildly inside. Who says we're not like that! What about Devereux and Nicole? I guess Fitzgerald got that stuff balled up too—

There was something else that surprised Penny—she'd no idea Suzie suspected she was being spied upon in Maine. But there it was in black and white: "I know she's watching me all the time now, sad-eyed, hurt. I think she's trying to figure me out. (Well, best of luck, Child!)"

She'd been so careful, but now she saw how easily she'd been found out:

Feel the prying eyes, the glowing eyes, staring out of the darkness, watching me with envy in the night. The cottage is my stage, but where is the applause? Nothing coming to me from my audience, no tears or laughter, not even a snicker or a hiss. I can only imagine the effect, and it's very spooky. Someone sitting there watching me, envying. The more wildly I perform the more tightly hands grip the chair. Jesus! I'm giving a sex show! Where are my watchers? Where are the faceless men? Where are their hoots, their pants? Do they whack off silently to my noisy humping on the stage?

There was something mystical about that, and other passages as well, a wild leap from Suzie's awareness of being watched to her fantasy that she was giving a sex show for an audience of men. But Suzie had been uncanny in her accuracy, had guessed at details she could not possibly have observed. It was true: Penny's hands
had
gripped the rocking chair and she
had
been stimulated, afraid to make the slightest noise, even afraid her chair would squeak. How could Suzie have known about that? Had she possessed the "genius of the mad?"

Yes, there were strange passages, and lurking always in the background was the unnamed indifferent lover, the "Dark Man" of the diary, the one who'd be sickened by her love-sick eyes just as she was sickened by Cynthia French:

Whenever we see each other he's so goddamn cool. All those nights I spent in his arms—it's as if they mean nothing now, as if they're part of a deep and ancient past. What is it that makes him so special? Why do all other men seem so meager by comparison? I make up prints from the orgy, send them to him wondering what he'll think. Will he call me in the middle of the night? Tell me he wants me? Will the sight of my pussy, spread out, hungry and wet like a
skinmag
model's, like a whore's, a cunt's—will that turn him on again? Or will he be disgusted? Enraged? I barely sleep the next three nights, so great is my suspense. Then my envelope comes back. It's been misaddressed. Such an obvious slip—I'm totally disgusted and don't send it off again—

O
ne morning, a week after their crazy high-speed journey to Maine, she and Jared had another argument. It started over something trivial—she asked him to turn down the radio so she could read the
Times
in peace. But soon it escalated and then she called him lazy, and he accused her of being selfish and acting more like Suzie every day.

"Sorry," she told him, "you'll just have to take me as I am."

"I love you as you are. It's what you're turning into I can't stand." She stood up, placed her hands on her hips, gave him a mocking look. "That's just what I mean," he said.

"What?"

"The way you're looking at me now. Your stance. Everything."

She laughed at him, put on her running shoes, and went out to Central Park to jog alone. It was pleasant to run by herself for a change, to get out of that claustrophobic apartment, away from Jared too. They were spending too much time together. They never saw anybody else. They never did anything. He just sat around and made feeble efforts to get a job. She at least had a career. He was jealous of her for that, and over her interest in Suzie, too. He couldn't stand the way she studied the diary, her questions about Suzie and everything she'd done. It was important, she realized, for her to get away from him, preserve some privacy for herself. From now on, she decided, she'd run alone, find her own pace, use the time to think things over and unwind.

She started getting up earlier, going out without him, when the track around the reservoir was still
uncrowded
and the dawn had barely come. There were fewer runners then; the cold air and late autumn sunrises had chased many of them out of Central Park. She liked the solitude, the sense of freedom, and also the chance to look at other people, meet their eyes.

She'd never done that before; she had been too shy, had always looked down at the ground when she passed someone, afraid she'd be recognized, afraid of people's stares. But now she welcomed these encounters, so fast, intense, these mutual inspections of faces and bodies, these rapid comings-together and drawings-apart, these momentary intimacies when she could hear the person's breathing, smell his sweat.

Seeing a male runner coming from the opposite direction, she'd scrutinize him closely, examine his face, perhaps even smile just a moment before they passed. Meeting him again she'd smile more broadly, and sometimes, at the last moment, subtly lower her eyes. Spotting a bulge if his running pants were tight, she'd turn after he'd passed, admire him from behind. Sometimes he'd turn, too, and then both of them would laugh.
I'm becoming a crotch-watcher
, she thought.
I'm cruising guys. I like it; it's harmless and it's fun!