The Man in My Basement (18 page)

“…three…”

…and then slammed her head back on the mattress.

“…four…”

“I love you,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Please. I can’t take it.”

“Five.”

I released her and moved my teasing hand away. I stood above her and she turned over on her stomach, inviting me to lie down on her back.

“Do you hear something, Charles?”

I had just awakened in the dark room. Narciss was standing at the window, cupping her ear toward the pane.

I got up and went to her. It pleased me that she was still naked. I put my arm around her slender waist and she draped her arm on my shoulder.

“Listen,” she said.

In the silence of night, you could barely make it out. No more than a murmur, it was only audible due to the proximity of my mother’s window.

“It’s that man again,” I said.

“What man?”

“The man who lives out in these woods some summers. It’s a hobo or something. Now and then someone calls the police, but they never find him. He’s crazy, and sometimes when he drinks too much wine, he gets pretty loud. He keeps his distance though. You have to listen closely just to hear it at all.”

“Have you seen him?”

“No, never.”

“Then how do you know all of that?”

“I’ve found his camps and empty bottles of cheap wine. Some people have seen him too, but not me.” My lies were becoming too large. I knew I should let it go, but I couldn’t. “We called him the Padre when I was younger, because some folks said that he was preaching to the trees. He seems harmless enough.”

I kissed Narciss and she forgot about Anniston Bennet’s shouts and my lies.

Narciss needed to talk. She was very nervous about surrendering so completely to a man she hardly knew and told me so.

“The last time I fell for a man so fast, it was all wrong,” she said as I was rubbing body oil into her shoulders. “It felt wonderful, but he wasn’t the man for me.”

“But he was right for a moment,” I argued.

“He was awful. He would take things from my house.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. A pearl ring, twenty dollars that I kept in a cookie jar, even large things like a toaster that I kept under the sink. At first I thought I was going crazy. But then one day I set a paper clip on the back of my jewelry box. He must have lifted the lid without noticing the pin. I knew immediately that he’d taken my zircon earrings. He did it three more times after that, and I broke up with him.”

She pulled away from my massage and lay on her back. I reclined, resting my head on her small stomach.

“Why did you wait?” I asked. “Why didn’t you get rid of him after the first time?”

She sat up, pushing my head down into her lap. I kissed her stomach. I remember because she had a ticklish reaction and then grabbed my hair to make me stop.

“It was weird,” she said. “Like
The Twilight Zone.
I knew he was doing it, but he didn’t know that I knew. I’d leave money in my purse or an earring on the night table and then he’d come in and do that love thing he did.”

“It was that good?” I asked.

“He was a wonderful lover,” she said. “But that wasn’t why I kept him on for so long. It was like he was my shy prostitute, you know? He didn’t want to feel like a whore, so I would let him steal from me and pretend that I didn’t miss it.”

I kissed her stomach again. This time she didn’t grab my hair.

“So then why did you finally decide to break it off?”

“Because I started to change,” she said.

“Change how?”

“I don’t know if I should talk about it. I mean I don’t even know you.” Narciss stroked my head then, but I refrained from any more kisses.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I understand. We all have our secrets.”

Really I didn’t care about Narciss’s secret sex life with her gigolo. I was thinking about the man in my basement, about what the consequences might be after he got out of his cell.

“It’s not any kind of big secret or anything,” she said. “It was just that I was acting like some other person and I didn’t like who that person was.”

“And who was that?” I asked, sitting up.

“I was aggressive. I made him do things and I asked him questions while we were… were doing it. I started calling him names and doing things that I never did before.”

“What kind of things?”

She had finally caught my interest.

“I have to go to the bathroom.” She stood up and walked out of my mother’s door.

I went to the window and cupped my ear to the pane. It could have been a moose, maybe five miles distant. That’s what I could have said.

I was tired and almost scared of what I had done to Anniston Bennet. I wondered if he had a strong heart—if the stressful time in my basement might kill him. I wanted to run down while Narciss was in the toilet and make sure that the prisoner wasn’t dying. But then I thought that Bennet’s death would make everything easier. No one knew where he was, he said. I could just put him in the ground in my family’s plot. If no one was looking for him, he’d never be found. For a brief moment I considered leaving him down there until he died of starvation. If he died he couldn’t get back at me.

When I realized that I was contemplating murder, I backed away from the window.

“Did you see him?” Narciss said from behind.

“No. No.”

“Then why’d you jump away from the window like that?”

“I just remembered something. I have to go into the city tomorrow for a meeting. I thought it was the day after, but I just realized that I got confused.”

“Oh.” There was disappointment in Narciss’s voice. “How will I get back to my car?”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride to your car when we get up.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “I thought you were trying to get rid of me now.”

“Why would you think that? You think I’d kick you out of my house in the middle of the night?”

“You’ve been so restless,” she said. “I thought you wanted to be alone.”

It was then that I realized what had happened to me. Really, what had happened to the world around me. Before Anniston Bennet had come into my life, I was invisible, moving silently among the people of the Harbor. No one wondered about me; no one questioned me. Even my best friends simply accepted what they saw. The cardplayer with a sharp tongue who couldn’t back up half the things he said. The petty thief, the man across the street, dead Samuel’s son. I might as well have been a tree at the end of the block. People saw me well enough to walk around, but that was just about it.

And for my part I treated everything and everyone around me in the same way. I could put a name on them, maybe. But I rarely touched or spoke a meaningful word to a soul. Weeks could go by and not one worthwhile piece of information would pass between me and another human being. The only chance I had at intimacy was with Clarance and Cat, but 90 percent of my time with them was spent under the influence of alcohol.

But now everything was different—half different, really. Still nobody saw me. The people at Curry’s bar in East Hampton, people on the street in the Harbor. Bethany and Narciss saw something that was like me—an image of what I thought I wanted to be—but they had no idea what was on my mind.

What had changed was what I saw. It was as if everybody had become like a mirror, and I saw reflections of what they saw instead of what it was they were trying to show me or tell me. Narciss had become a mirror and an echo chamber, giving me back every word uttered and gesture made. And when I saw or heard something I didn’t like, I had the chance to alter my behavior.

“No, baby,” I said. “Not at all. I want to see you. I want you here. It’s just that there’s been so much on my mind, and I feel so comfortable with you that I kind of sink into it, if you know what I mean.”

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

But her nipples were tightening again, and I was feeling the beginnings of another erection.

“Let’s go to bed,” I said. I could have been an actor in an old black-and-white movie. An airplane ace or international journalist, world-weary and in need of quiet love.

She was in the movie too, and happy with her role. Arm in arm we walked back to the bed, moving together like choreographed dancers. Every kiss hit its mark and every breath was on cue.

A
nniston Bennet stopped shouting sometime the next morning. After driving Narciss to her car, I went down to the hatch and listened, but there wasn’t a murmur or sound. At first I thought about going in and checking on him, but then I decided that I should stick to my guns and make him wait the full ninety-six hours. I figured that he was still going to be mad no matter what, so I might as well do something worth him being mad.

I spent almost all of the next three days away from the house. The first night I hung out at Curry’s bar, lying about my business and drinking up a storm. In the morning I got up early and started worrying about the sergeant that Bennet had slaughtered in North Vietnam.

But we aren’t in Vietnam,
I said to myself.

But he is a killer,
I answered.

That morning I had made a date to go horseback riding for the first time in my life. I’d met a young white couple named Jodie and Byron. They were wealthy and invited me to come riding with them. I said that I’d never ridden before, but they promised that they’d show me how.

They had a girl they wanted me to meet. Extine was her name. She took me, along with Jodie and Byron, on a trip in woods around Southampton that I had never seen. Every inch of those woods is etched in my memory by the pain that saddle inflicted.

Jodie and Extine were cousins. Byron was Jodie’s husband. They lived in the Hamptons every summer and fall and then spent the rest of the year between Aspen and Maui. Their money came from their parents. Who knows where it was before that?

Extine had big blond hair and big teeth that she presented in a permanent smile.

Extine loved horses. She told me that she had ridden every day of her life since the age of twelve.

“I love horses’ hair and teeth and eyes,” she told me two minutes after we met. “When I was a girl I’d sneak out of the house at night to sleep in the stables with my mare.”

“It’s great that you had something like that,” I said. “I know a lot of people who never had something that they loved so much.”

I was thinking about myself—about how I had wandered in and out of the same front door for thirty-three years without ever knowing which way I should have been going.

“Boy just like a housefly,” Uncle Brent used to say. “So busy buzzin’ he don’t see the wall till it smack him upside the head.”

“You don’t think I’m crazy?” Extine asked with a sort of wonderment in her voice.

“I guess you could say that you were crazy,” I said. “I mean
crazy
basically means that you’re different from everybody else, and since you know what you want and most other people don’t have any idea, then they got to call you crazy. But only because they’re jealous.”

Extine loved me after that. She was a big physical girl, just like her mare. All she wanted was to gallop and romp up and down the hot trails around the Hamptons.

She liked my company because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with her obsession with horses. As a matter of fact I liked her because everything about her came down to horses. And a horse was an animal, like a deer.

Byron and Jodie took Extine and me to a
cabin
in woods connected to a property that was either theirs or a friend’s.

It was a large place, and soon after dinner the big blond horsewoman and I wandered off to a secluded part of the residence.

That night we kissed a lot, but she didn’t want to have sex. Extine was engaged to a guy named Sanderson who wouldn’t mind if she kissed somebody, but he’d draw the line at intercourse.

I didn’t care. My inner thighs were in deep pain. I was sure that I was bleeding on the inside. I fell asleep midkiss and didn’t wake up until noon the next day. My new friends were all gone, leaving me miles away from anywhere without a car. I spent most of the afternoon walking down paths in an abandoned apple orchard, trying to find a way down to the road.

It was a hot day and I had to remove my sweater and top shirt. I was still in pain and limping, very thirsty too, I remember, and slightly panicked that I might die out there in the woods. The dirt of the path was bone-dry. The blossoms of the apples had begun their transformation to fruit. For a long time I hadn’t thought about my prisoner, but on that desolate walk he came back to me.

A white man, maybe, who didn’t know one thing about his past. Pure evil in the way of business. A thief and a killer by his own admission. Why did he want to be caged, anyway? He never really answered my question.

I thought that maybe I should disappear to Aspen or Hawaii. Maybe I should let the white man go and take his money and vanish.

I made it to a back road and finally got a ride to Curry’s. There I sat and drank until closing time. When they kicked me out, I slept in my car and rose with the sun stabbing my eyes.

He could have been dead for all that I knew. But the deal was ninety-six hours, and I cracked the hatch on the second. The air in there was musty. I snapped on the light, and Anniston Bennet rose to his feet. He was bare chested but wore his bright-blue bottoms. Thick black hairs sprouted from his jaw, and there were gray bags under his eyes.

“Morning, Mr. Bennet,” I said. “You ready to get outta here?”

His eyes, I noticed, were black, not blue. The absence of his contact lenses seemed to be saying something that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

“I screamed for a whole day after you dropped that door,” he said. “I kept it up like a chant. Must be pretty soundproof. After that didn’t work I sharpened that can opener you left on the floor outside the cage. Then I made a slingshot out of the elastic in my other pair of pants. I was going to wait until you walked in and then I was going to shoot you dead.”