Strange Flesh (6 page)

To me such unique jewelry spoke to the ethereal nature of its owner, but I’d heard a sour-pussed Grotonian complain that they were just “tacky dye-cultured fakes.” Spiteful, yes, but I later found out she was right in a sense. They
were
a replica of a strand that had been assembled over centuries, but only because to wear the originals demanded a massive security detail. Anyway, those were on loan to a museum in Kyoto
because a small war had been fought over them during the Tokugawa shogunate.

According to legend, the pearls were collected by a bloodthirsty witch-queen who had a special hidden grotto over which she liked to hang her victims after they’d submitted to her twisted pleasures. Eventually their bodies would fall and be consumed by the local sharks, their blood seeping into the oyster beds below. After each victim, the queen then sent a virgin village girl to harvest a single pearl. Blythe’s strand grew to over a hundred stones before the peasants revolted, and a minor warlord, sensing opportunity, invaded the prefecture. Though the evil queen was eventually fed to her rather ungrateful familiars, members of her cult retrieved the pearls, and the strand continued to grow. How Blythe ended up with them is a saga unto itself.

I stood there for a minute thinking desperately of what to say. An attitude of servility seemed best.

“Would the lady care for a fresh adult beverage?”

She smiled but didn’t open her eyes. “They’ve made poor little Jimmy the hatchet man, huh?”

“Not at all.
Nous casa, vous casa
. I think you’d make a fine member here.”

One eye opened. “What a revolting idea.”

“That’s not likely to be the most revolting idea you hear tonight if you stay with us.”

“Pryce, go away. I’m looking for someone to fight with.”

“Try me. I can be very irritating when called upon.”

“I don’t know who put you up to this, but I’m not leaving.”

“’Course not. Why would you? You’ll be thrilled to know we have a lively round of COD on tap, followed by strip poker. We may even have an orgy, at which you’d be more than welcome.”

“Oh, barf. Wellesley?”

“No, I believe our guests tonight hail from Brookline High School.”

“Liar. You’re not going to have any orgy.”

I cut my eyes over to the giant stuffed fruit bat perched over the bar and winced. “I think Fulgencio may beg to differ.” The club mascot’s head came off to reveal a secret compartment intended for Cuban cigars but in practice used as our ceremonial stash locker. It was generally filled with at least ten hits of Ecstasy.

“You are all vermin . . . Fine, you can walk me home.”

“And miss my first orgy?”

“If you think
you’re
in line for an orgy, you’re probably too stupid to help me find my way. Enjoy yourself with your boyfriends.” She got up, a trace of sway in her step. I offered her my arm.

Despite having devoted long hours to speculating about what I might do to please Blythe Randall, all I could come up with was a plan so ridiculous, I suppose it had a certain childish charm. “Why don’t we go to the vault at Herrell’s and tell each other secrets? They have milk shakes there.” Herrell’s was an ice cream parlor housed in an old bank.

She gave me a long appraising look and finally pointed to our bar. “Might I suggest you liberate that scotch?”

Out on the street, Blythe was less stable. She whispered into my neck, “You know, you’re very sweet, but all this really isn’t necessary.”

“Well, I’m getting a milk shake, and it’s going to seem a little strange if I’m sitting there by myself mumbling about how I used to jerk off to
Murder, She Wrote
in junior high.”

Blythe allowed a ripple of laughter and slapped me on the chest. She turned to face me and said, “Milk shakes, then. But I must warn you, I have a lot of secrets.” She wobbled, and I caught her in a half embrace.

Behind me I heard a soft male voice say, “Blythe.”

At first I thought it was Coles, in which case I’d have retreated and let her have the fight she was looking for. On turning, however, I saw that it was Blake, headed toward the Bat. Blythe stiffened, her buzz draining right out of her.

I said, “Hey, Blake.”

“How are you doing tonight, Blythe?”

“I guess I’m getting by. James was just taking me for a milk shake to cheer me up.”

“Well . . . What a gentleman you are, James. Listen, I need to have a word with my sister. Would you mind having your milk shake another time?”

I shrugged and gestured to her.

Blythe closed her eyes briefly and said, “Fine. What do you want?”

He put his arm around her, saying, “Let’s talk on the way back to your room.”

I watched them cross Mt. Auburn Street, Blake speaking into his sister’s ear. She began rubbing a temple. After another moment of his rebuke, Blythe stopped in the middle of the still, snow-covered street and said, “Blake, I can do whatever
the fuck
I want.”

Blake raised his voice too, but he was turned away from me, so I couldn’t hear him.

Whatever he said, the last bit of his speech caused Blythe’s face to freeze. She slowly straightened, and then unleashed a wicked backhand that connected with Blake’s cheek so hard he stumbled sideways. He grabbed her and shook as if building up to further violence.

I had enough Texan chivalry in me that I wasn’t going to stand by while a woman was assaulted in the street. I started walking over to where the Randall twins were locked in their vehement pas de deux.

Blythe saw me move, and she went rigid. Blake, always attuned to her, let go instantly and turned. Doing so snapped him out of his rage, and his face displayed plummeting grief as it dawned on him what had almost happened. A desperate urge to make amends flowed into his eyes, and he reached out to his sister.

But Blythe was having none of it. Looking back to ensure he was still watching, she marched up to me, took a deep breath, and then, incredibly, kissed me gently on the mouth.

Even at the time, I was well aware of my role as a mere prop in their family drama, but nonetheless, the touch of her lips was clearly the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. All my thousand versions of this dream uniting in one surpassing moment of consummation.

I might have felt differently had I known that when she kissed me, that surge of divine electricity she sent through my mind would prove overpowering. So strong that it melted the delicate reset circuitry that would allow me to ever really love anyone else.

A
fter Blythe, I, like my father, transferred my passion for women to one for men: Jim Beam, Jack Daniel, and Basil Hayden.

Memories of my sophomore summer are pretty blurred around the edges. By the end of it, a vast misunderstanding with the Cambridge police had landed me in a tense meeting with my house master, an old Bat alum. He suggested that I could avoid a dire encounter with the Administrative Board—famously eager to make disciplinary examples at the beginning of a term—by voluntarily taking a year off in order to “better reach my full maturity.” The date was September 8, 2001.

A week later, I got a message that a grad was looking for me at the Bat. He was a fairly young but professorial guy, and without so much as an introduction, he asked me, “So how’d you like to help us rat-fuck Osama?”

Seeking vengeance quickly cured my depression, and I developed a reputation as a technical asset who also enjoyed the “operational” side of our work. This led to training across a wide spectrum of the clandestine arts, and I discovered a certain bloodlust and an aptitude for duplicity, both of which served me well during several pretty hairy undercover assignments.

All told, I guess we know that bin Laden’s life wasn’t much affected by my efforts in the Global War on Terror. But there are several Saudi
financiers who are right now wondering how the hand of Allah guided them to Kazakhstani prison camps.

I never went back to school, and five years of such quiet victories garnered me Susan Mercer’s contact information. Which proved to be worth a quadrupling of my salary upon joining Red Rook Security.

I found myself well suited to my new job and advanced rapidly. But my pleasant routine was again swamped by romance. I managed to meet and hang on to a lovely girl named Erica, a whip-smart redhead brimming with levity. Though a member of the class two years below mine at school, she’d already made vice president at a stylish record label. We spent long nights at outer-borough rock clubs and abused the flexibility of our work schedules with endless mornings of canoodling sloth. Last winter I tendered a big diamond on a Balinese beach under an almost unrealistic canopy of stars. We’d been very happy.

Six weeks before our wedding, I walked into my study to find Erica leaning over a series of pictures spread out on my desk. I prepared a guilty cringe, thinking of the palliative measures my friends had recommended for when the fiancée discovers your porn stash. But as she turned, I noticed that the photos had been scattered with wet blotches.

She regarded me red-eyed, evaluating. And I realized how bad this was. Which pictures she’d found. I stayed silent for a moment, thinking,
I’m not that awful. It’s not as terrible as it seems
.

“You know there’s really nothing you can say.”

She was right.

I’d often marveled at the way my peers tended to date bad women. Bossy drunks and fashion monsters. But the peril of living with a brilliant and marvelous lady is that she’s hard to fool, and the guilt is crushing when you disappoint her.

The images would look almost innocuous to most people. The surprisingly tasteful artifacts of an intimate photo session between two young lovers. But the model was a slender collegiate woman with long blond hair. You’d have to call her willowy. Her only adornment in the last of them: a string of pale scarlet pearls. I was always amazed that Blythe had let me photograph her, and I savored those demonstrations of her trust.

“James, I just can’t ever be her. I’m sorry.”

I wanted to explain. Not to defend myself; I’d have gladly swallowed a puffer fish if I thought it could magically draw away her pain. I wanted her to know that I’d kept those pictures not as fetishes to creep in and venerate late at night, but rather as proof that I could bear thinking about Blythe. That it was safe to revisit those moments. In the same sense that former smokers always say, “You haven’t really quit until you can walk around for a month with a pack in your pocket.” The fact that I hadn’t pulled them out in years proved that I was cured.

But the last stage of beating cigarettes is when you tire of carrying around that stupid box and finally discard it. Erica had said to me at the beginning, “Creature, I know what she meant to you back then. I know how intense young love can be. So I
need
to know, once and for all: you’re not still holding on to any of that, are you?”

And now she’d run the numbers and come up with the only logical answer. Weaselly quant that I am, I fought to suppress the protest that numbers are just symbols and thus are infinitely malleable. Two and two
doesn’t
always
equal four. But normal people view those who make such arguments with even greater contempt than the ones who can’t do the arithmetic to begin with.

The undeniable fact of the matter remained: when I bought the ring, those pictures had to go into the fire.

Classy to the end, Erica departed without hysteria. She left me alone with the images I had kept to help master the moment when the fissure in my heart had first formed. But the spell had backfired, and now my protective wards were streaked with tears from the wonderful woman whose heart they broke in turn.

Harvard’s tragedy telegraph operates with shameful efficiency. Though six months have passed since our broken engagement, I’m sure I have that episode to thank for Blythe’s reappearance in my life. Blake hears of my “troubles” and then thinks of me when he has some trouble of his own.

Of course, mine have gotten even worse in the interim. Women, naturally, remain the problem.