Chapter 46

Val drove to the Blake house and parked. Paul Blake, pacing his front yard, his hands in the pockets of his gray jogging suit, watched her for several moments as she crossed the street, then he strode into his house.

Unhurriedly she walked up the driveway, noting the Century 21 for-sale sign on a lawn which was not yet unkempt but overdue for mowing. The front door was ajar; she left it open behind her. Footprints were tracked on the parquet floor of the entryway, a thick coat of dust dulled the glass-topped hall table. There was a mustiness in the house, an air of abandonment.

Paul Blake sat in the white armchair, his gray jogging shoes propped carelessly on the matching ottoman. His blue eyes seemed transparently pale against the light background. “Sit down,” he said.

The voice was cool, the posture self-possessed. Her instincts told her that she need not make any statement about precautions she had taken; and only then did she concede the real depth of her fear in coming here.

“I’ll stand,” she told him with the insolence of her newfound confidence. “This can’t take long.”

His gaze drifted down her. “You’ve got guts, I’ll say that. Too bad you can’t be the man you wish you were. Too bad you can’t give her what a man can—a good house, good food, good clothes, protection.”

“Protection. I heard the man say protection.”

His expression did not change.

She said, “At her age I was married too. I had all those things.” Again his gaze drifted down her.

“Yes, I remember. Someone actually married you.”

She smiled. “Twice.”

“We’re the same age…How tragic that women live longer than men when the law of gravity is so much crueler to you. Look at you—you’ve already begun to sag. A few decent years, that’s all you’ve got. I’m nowhere near my prime.”

So this was why he wanted this meeting—or at least one of the reasons. To reclaim his territorial rights by assuring her that she had won no victory, that her gains were short term and illusory.

The List etched itself clearly in her mind. She crossed her arms. “She’s with me,” she said slowly, with relish. “Where she wants to be.”

He said evenly, “Queer is such a perfect word for you. You are queer. A freak. She’s been with men, she’ll go back to men when she gets tired of being fucked by a queer.”

There was an almost palpable sensation of the words caroming off her, off the impervious armor of her confidence. Never again would she allow the best of herself to be diminished. Why had she ever allowed it?

“I have her now.” She spread her feet and said with deep pleasure, drawing out the words, “I’ll have her a good long time, all that sweetness of her to enjoy…to the fullest. You’ll never have her again.”

He stared at her with his transparent eyes. “You’re pathetic. An imitation man. A perversion of a man. A dyke, a cuntsucking—”

“She doesn’t like to be sucked.” Her voice was soft, containing none of the exhilaration she felt. “I start by putting my tongue just up inside and circling her. Her hips rock, she goes crazy.”

The transparent eyes froze on her.

“I know all the ways to move my tongue, how to make her moan and want to come, but not let her come.”

As his face blanched, she watched with the most savage joy she had ever known, the adrenaline surging through her.

He rose. She squared her shoulders and stood to her full height.

She said, gauging him, “You saw us that Sunday—did you watch the whole afternoon? Did you see all those times? Did you watch all those ways she loved me?”

She braced as he moved toward her; she would slash the edge of one hand across his throat, drive the knuckles of the other hand into his eyes.

“Every night from now on I’ll have her. Every night she’ll be fucked by this queer.”

She stopped, not because he had halted a few feet from her, but because she was finished, and because every item was gone from The List.

She stared into his white face. She could smell alcohol on his breath. He moved around her, past her, and into the guest room.

Her euphoria vanished. Fear took cold shape. Had he gone in there for a weapon? Nonplussed, unsure, she hesitated, then took two steps toward the door she had left open.

“Wait,” he commanded from behind her.

A painting under each arm, he walked up to her and placed them on the floor, turned their faces out to her. “These are what I wanted to return.”

In sick dread, understanding what she would see, she forced her eyes downward.

Across the grays of the rain painting, the slashes were diagonal and ragged, as if the blade had deliberately paused to inflict deeper damage. In Summer Sunrise the slashes were vertical and so close together that fragments of the canvas hung from the frame; the thin gaps in the bright oranges of the canvas were dark and jagged, as if the sun were bleeding black blood.

“A vandal,” he said.

She wrenched her anguished eyes away from the corpses of her paintings to meet his pale blue stare.

“I wanted to give them to you personally,” he said. “You see how it feels to have some pervert destroy what another person values.”

“Pervert,” she repeated. “Perversion is destroying what you yourself value. Especially when it can never be replaced.”

Unable to look down, she gestured to the paintings. “Other things can be replaced. Like these.”

He would not know that she could only make replicas, that the creative spark and urgency that gave force and depth to these paintings had been used up and was gone.

She reached into the pocket of her jeans and he stepped quickly back. She realized in sharp exultation that they were equals in their apprehensive mistrust of each other.

“I have something to return to you, too.” She raised her hand and let the ring fall onto the carpet.

Their eyes locked.

She said, “If you come near us I’ll kill you.” To say these words was the reason she had come here.

He smiled, and she was the one to take an involuntary step backward. A memory flashed through her—the same memory as the night she had first met Paul Blake—of being in the desert with Neal, and retreating in dread revulsion from the shiny rattler patrolling its territory with easy and deadly efficiency.

“Why should I come near you?” His eyes held the arctic cold of a shark. He said softly, “There are other women.”

He pushed the paintings toward her. “Take these and get out.” She closed the door of the Blake house behind her, wishing she could hermetically seal it.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 508