The Juliette Society (26 page)

It’s not as if I’m intending to stay, as if I even want to be here, so I say, ‘It’s OK, I’ll just stand.’

I lean against the wall and feel it start to give way behind me, then realize it’s not part of the wall at all but a floor-to-ceiling tower of those white paper boxes with the wire handles containing Chinese takeout food.

It’s been less than a week since the story broke on Forrester Sachs, Bundy’s only been hiding out for three or four days. He couldn’t possibly have eaten all this food in that time. Unless the anxiety made him binge-eat. Bundy’s a little chubby anyway so it’s hard to tell if he’s gained weight. I figure Bundy’s one of those eternal teenagers who never loses his puppy fat, it just gets less cute with age.

There are stacks of baseball hats that still have the tags attached and boxes of trainers he’s never worn, never even opened. Bundy tells me he wears a new pair of trainers every day and dumps the old ones in the trash like they’re candy wrappers. He says it’s his one indulgence. But I suspect the only reason anyone would wear a new pair of shoes every day is because they’ve got really bad foot hygiene.

Suddenly it dawns on me why it smells so bad in here. Not from moldy pizza and discarded Chinese food. From Bundy’s rotting feet. It’s the kind of odor that’s really hard to cover up and seems to linger on everything, like the smell of vomit. It smells so bad in Bundy’s apartment that I’m trying to breathe through my mouth. I want to get out of here as quickly as I can, but Bundy’s decided his woes are so great that he wants to tell me his entire life story, from beginning to now. From before he was even born. From the day his parents decided to name him.

Bundy’s sitting cross-legged on the floor like a sulking child playing with his toys. ‘I’m not a bad person,’ he says. ‘I was just made this way.’ As he says it, he’s absent-mindedly stuffing a Chewbacca action figure head first into a pussy-in-a-can.

Bundy’s apartment is crammed with toys – plush toys and sex toys – and to him they’re all the same. A pair of Care Bears are positioned on all fours, facing away from each other, both split at the seams to accommodate a double-ended dildo that’s been forced into their stuffing. There’s a Teletubby wearing a strap-on as a face mask. It’s as if he tried to upgrade his obsessions and got stuck halfway, somewhere in the middle between adolescent and twenty-something jerk-off, but ended up hopelessly infantilized, obsessively compulsively sexualizing everything in his reach that was previously wholesome and pure.

He has a huge life-size poster of Britney Spears on the wall, wearing Daisy Dukes with the buttons undone, and her hands on her hips as if she’s about to peel them off, a white cotton crop-top that seems specifically designed to show off the curve of her tits, and a look that says,
you know you want to fuck me, but think again, Buster
.

It’s Britney Spears in her prime, when she was every man’s fantasy; the all-American hot-bodied blonde cock-tease. And before she broke a million male hearts by reminding them of the psycho girlfriend you wished you’d never met, let alone thought of putting your cock inside.

He also has a large collection of Star Wars figures lined along his mantle, but only wookiees. He’s not interested in anything other than wookiees. Bundy tells me he’s always loved wookiees. And he thinks it might be the same reason he only likes women with natural pubic hair, women who never shave.

Bundy says that’s the reason he’s so fixated on blow jobs – ‘the receiving, not the giving,’ he takes pains to point out to me – is that it really doesn’t matter whether she’s shaved or unshaved. Because he never gets that far.

For him, oral pleasure staves off hirsute disappointment. But the upshot is he’s continually sexually unfulfilled.

Bundy’s pouring out all his woes to me, his sexual history, his personality flaws, and I don’t want to listen any more. I want to tell him how angry I was about receiving money after visiting the Juliette Society.

‘You set me up,’ I say.

I can feel myself getting mad but I don’t want to show it. I don’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing that he’s rattled me.

‘Set you up how?’ he says. ‘With Anna?’

‘The money, for that party.’

‘What party?’ he says.

‘The Juliette Society,’ I reply, like he doesn’t know.

‘Who?’ Bundy says.

I say it again.

‘The Juliette Society, Bundy.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says. ‘I never paid the girls. I only took the money.’

I’m confused, but I need to get to the real point of my visit. ‘Bundy, I’m seriously worried, where’s Anna?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I swear I don’t know.’

Just like he swears he didn’t kill those girls.

‘Did you do the same thing to Anna,’ I ask angrily, ‘try to extort money from her?’

‘I wouldn’t do that to Anna,’ he says. ‘I’d never do anything bad to her. I love Anna. I’ve wanted her so bad,’ he says, and he’s almost close to tears. ‘I don’t even care if she’s shaved or not.’

Bundy tells me he tried to get with Anna so many times and did everything he could to impress her. She’s the only woman he’s ever spent more than ten bucks on, other than his mom. He bought her gifts, he bought her jewelry. But Anna always brushed him off.

‘She told me she loved me like a brother,’ he says, ‘but she prefers men to boys.’

Bundy’s looking up at me with big sad eyes and he wants me to tell him, it’s OK. But there’s not a whole lot I can say because I know exactly what she means. He’s only pining for Anna because she broke his heart. And, as a coda to his tale of woe, he keeps repeating the same two things over and over, like a broken record.

‘I didn’t kill her,’ he says, ‘and I didn’t kill those girls.’

‘I believe you, Bundy,’ and as I say it, I realize I do believe him. ‘But do you have any idea, any idea at all about where she might be?’

And, finally, he comes out with it. ‘There was this party she was going to. You might find her there.’

‘What party?’ I ask suspiciously.

But before he’s even replied, I realize that I’m going to have to go there and I don’t have a choice.

21

I’m walking after dark through the grounds of a large Italianate villa – the location of the party Bundy arranged for a car service to, the place he said I might, just might, find Anna. It’s also the night before Bob’s election and there’s so much to do that Jack’s sleeping over at the campaign office.

I’m following a path that winds through little dips and climbs and curves. Wherever I am, I can see this sprawling villa up on a hill, cast in silhouette by the light of a full moon sitting low in the night sky and half-obscured by a great hulking cumulus cloud that just hangs there because the air is so still.

There is only one path – it doesn’t split off or meet with others – but I never see anyone else ahead of me, even when it starts to straighten out, and no one walks back towards me. The path looks exactly the same all the way along: lined with dirt and outlined by boulders, beyond which are dense thickets of bushes and trees peppered with wild flowers and orchids so vivid and luminous in hue that they seem to glow in the dark. The path is lit by this strange ambient light with no apparent source – the kind of half-light that makes everything seem alive – which falls off just a couple of feet on either side of the path.

I’m wearing same red cape that I wore at the
Eyes Wide Shut
party and a pair of black Mary Jane flats, and I feel like Little Red Riding Hood hurrying home to Grandma’s. The silence, the stillness, the solitariness and the blackness are all creeping me out. I’m walking as briskly as I can, willing my destination to appear around every turn. But it never does.

I’m scurrying along this path, in the dark, heading to who knows where, and two thoughts are spinning through my head over and over, first one and then the other.

What am I doing here?

Fuck Bundy.

And I can’t think of enough ways to curse Bundy because I know, I just know, he’s set me up again but I have to find Anna and I don’t have any choice. I curse Bundy’s birth, I curse his parents, I curse his stupid tattoos, his ugly penis and his stinking feet. I can’t still the voice in my head and it becomes so deafening and insistent that I have to check I’m not saying it aloud. Not that there’s anyone around to hear me. I’m running in circles through my head and, every so often, I stumble on the answer.

Anna.

I’m here to find Anna.

I have to find Anna.

Just thinking it steels my determination to reach my goal, and I quicken my pace.

I’m so lost in my thoughts that I forget where I am and it takes the edge off the anxiety and the fear of walking alone in the dark, because although there’s not a soul in sight, it’s teeming with life I can hear. The way the sounds of nature fill the air when you’re walking through a forest, even if you can’t see the source. I don’t hear the sound of a forest, I hear the murmur of sex, the humming of fucking, the sounds of pleasure unbound. Laughter, shrieks, grunts and moans. The slap of skin on skin. And when I peer into the darkness, off the path, I think I can make out limbs entwined in branches, bodies bent over boughs, buttocks sprouting from bushes, figures rutting in the undergrowth. It feels like Eden before the Fall, when sex and nature were one, primal, carnal and wild. Temptation surrounds me.

Although it seems like I’m moving towards the house, I can’t be certain that’s where the path is actually leading because sometimes it doubles back on itself or slips into a series of sharp zig-zag turns. It doesn’t take long before I start to lose my orientation and I have no idea whether I’m going forward or backward, up or down. Yet I can always see the tall, thin ornamental tower of the villa, like a beacon or a lighthouse, to mark my way.

I feel like I’m walking through the opening montage of
Citizen Kane
; those famous first shots that begin so ominously with a No Trespassing sign hanging off a chain-link fence, then bleed into that long, slow vertical pan up across more fences, railings, gates and balustrades – each more ornate, more solid, more foreboding than the last – followed by a series of slow fades through the ruins of Xanadu, the monumental folly Kane built to celebrate his wealth, with his forbidding Gothic mansion dominating the background like a tombstone.

I think of those fences and gates as the barriers and constructs of my personality; the ones I erected all through childhood and adolescence to protect me from the world. I’m so wrapped up in my own life that I’d forgotten all those invisible fortifications were even there and, instead of protecting me, all they do is bar my way from looking inside of myself, from seeing who I really am. And now I realize I don’t want to walk through my entire life that way. I don’t want to end up like Charles Foster Kane: facing death, but still in denial of what drove him. A haunted man locked up in his haunted house, condemned to rot along with his estate.

This estate, the one I’m walking through, is as derelict as Kane’s, but the further I walk, the more whimsical and eccentric it gets. It’s a ruin designed to look like an antiquity, but built to bamboozle the archeologist who would one day stumble upon it. I’m walking past buildings just set back from the path that seem to tower above me as I approach, but when I get closer I see they’re built to a forced perspective and exist as nothing but skewed facades with flights of stairs that go nowhere. I pass a half-finished amphitheater that has seats and no stage and rows of columns bearing the faces of sprites and devils. Vast crumbling stone statues peek out over the treetops and from behind the undergrowth – of giants, gods, goddesses, nymphs, mythical creatures – all engaged in some form of sexual congress or exhibitionism. A giant turtle carrying a giant phallus on its back. A sphinx cupping its breasts as water spurts from the nipples. A colossus in battle armor holding his monumental engorged penis like a sword, ready to vanquish his foes.

I figure this place must have been built by some cash-rich financier with unlimited resources at his disposal as a monument to his outsized sexual imagination. Then, like Kane, he became impotent through age or dissatisfaction or putrefaction, and bequeathed his creation to Mother Nature, who embraced the stone deities as her own, swaddling the naked figures with mosses, vines, roots and weeds.

I feel the figures watching me, I hear the sound of sex in the trees and undergrowth and I hasten along the path, turning a corner, round a copse of trees, and coming upon a small tree-lined avenue with interlocking branches that form a canopy. It leads up to a large rock set into the hillside, carved into the face of an ogre – chubby and round, with a beard, small beady eyes and a mouth containing just a handful of small uneven teeth. It makes me think of the vagina dentata graffiti splashed on the wall outside the Fuck Factory. This is a vagina with teeth, eyes and pubic hair.

An inscription is carved around its upper lip, and stained in red like a tattoo:

AUD
ā
CISSIM
ē
P
ē
DITE
 

The ogre’s mouth is open wide, as if it’s laughing or screaming, I can’t tell which. Or maybe just screaming with laughter at some private joke. The ogre is looking at me, laughing at me, as if it’s recognized someone who doesn’t belong. Part of me feels like I just want to run inside its mouth and hide, no matter what I might find in there, in the pitch black, just so I don’t have to meet its gaze any more. Because that’s where the path leads, into the mouth of the ogre. That’s where it ends. There’s nowhere else to go, other than turn back and retrace my steps, but I have no intention of doing that. I have to find Anna.