Authors: Tim O'Brien
“S and M?”
“Sick!”
“Sick?” said I.
“Yeah, like—you know—
sick
. It means … Hard to explain. I mean, you meet this guy, let’s say, and he’s real tall and ugly and older than shit—sort of strange-ass cool—and you think: Sick! Know what I’m saying?”
I had not the slightest idea. Hence finesse:
“I’ll put it this way,” I said cagily. “I happen to
teach
this sick business. Our American tongue, that is.”
“You teach tongue?”
“Stock-in-trade, my dear.” I reached out and shook her callused, washerwoman’s hand. “Thomas H. Chippering, professor of linguistics.”
“No shit,” she muttered, and yawned, and stared vacantly. “Want me to model something?”
I took a seat.
“Sick!” I said.
And thus, by this bewildering sequence of events, I spent a fruitful, often spine-tingling forty-five minutes as a spectator to the latest in S and M. My plucky iron maiden modeled her entire collection, A to Z, chatting me up, occasionally requesting my assistance with keys and combinations.
“The thing is,” Carla informed me at one point, “I get tired of selling all those stupid sundresses and Mexican blouses and crap. Like, there’s no
pain
in it. You know what I mean?”
“Precisely,” said I, and looked directly into her tongue, where at the moment she was inserting a steel pin in the shape of a barbell.
“See, what people don’t realize,” said Carla, “is that nobody can fucking
hurt
you if you’re
already
fucking hurting. Am I right?” She paused thoughtfully. (The barbell impeded her speech not a whit.) “How the fuck old are you?”
“Forty plus,” said I.
“Sick!”
“And you? How the … How old would you be?”
“Lots and lots and lots less,” she said. “Clamp me, will you?”
“Pardon?”
“The handcuffs. Tight.”
I clamped her; she winced in gratitude.
“You’re catching on,” she said, and almost smiled. “Tall guys, they’ve got huge dicks, I suppose. Pile drivers?”
This was too much.
I stood up, shot her a rebuking glare, and started toward the door. Carla hooked my arm.
“Hey, come on,” she said. “All I meant was, I meant like you’re into
hurting
people, right? The S part? Which is totally cool.” Her lower lip quivered. “Revenge—I’ve been there. My ex-boyfriend, he was this motorcycle asshole, loved his hog more than me.”
“And?”
“And like—you know—I
know
.”
Then she wept.
Not only wept; the little pumpkin virtually fell into my arms. Spiked hair, dog collar, tongue pin—all irrelevant. She hugged me and shuddered and cried like a little girl. True, I shouldered the responsibility, yet at the same time I could not help wondering why it was that such odd, crippled creatures so often flit through my life. The maimed, the vulnerable, the emotionally disadvantaged.
“There, there,” I said.
She looked up. “You want to bite me?”
“I do not.”
“It’s okay. It’s
good
.”
“No, indeed,” I told her sternly. “This motorcycle chap. You struck back, I gather?”
Carla wiped her tears.
“Well, sure, that’s what I’m
saying
. Hurt him bad. Leaky brakes.” She blinked, looked down at her handcuffs, then sniffled provocatively. “Listen, man, you’re not so bad. If you want, I can give you some tips, like helpful hints about—you know—how to really torture people.”
I weighed my options.
“Kind of you,” I said. “Over dinner, perhaps?”
The girl frowned, then sighed heavily. “Okay, dinner. Biting. Nothing else. You’re way too old for me.”
“Righto,” I said.
“Promise?”
“I do. How much for the leg irons?”
Hours later, after a long and liquid supper, Carla and I exchanged reluctant goodbyes. (I am a flirt, yes. I am also Catholic. I do not freely copulate.)
Exhausted, somewhat melancholy, I embarked on a wee-hour drive out to the southeastern suburbs, parked in front of Lorna Sue’s house, sat quietly for a moment, then walked up the driveway and carefully slipped the leg irons and purple undergarments beneath the front seat of the tycoon’s ostentatiously upscale Mercedes. (No problem. Unlocked.)
My heart, I confess, was bubbling. Adrenaline was at work, and the aftershocks of young Carla, but beneath it all was a tremor of genuine sadness.
For some twenty minutes I reclined on the front lawn, staring up at the house, barely holding myself together. Behind those darkened bedroom windows, so blind and brooding, the girl of my dreams slept the night away in the arms of her princely new husband. How, I wondered, does the human animal tolerate such torture? That icy self-control of hers. That female practicality. (Flatly, without emotion, Lorna Sue had once advised me against becoming an eighteen-year-old, as if sorrow and rage were the province of children, as if an on-off switch had been built into the deep freeze of her reptilian heart.)
At one point I heard myself declaiming to the stars.
At another point I wept like young Carla.
And then later, on my hands and knees, I plucked a good many roses from their fertile new bed along the front steps. Whole bushes, in fact—yanking them out by the roots.
I recall almost nothing of the drive back to the hotel. Napalm fantasies, I believe.
Over the next forty-two hours I watched and waited. It was a ticklish period: close calls, dashed hopes. At times I feared my late-night handiwork would come to nothing. (For the experiment to succeed, it was vital that no one but Lorna Sue recover the incriminating articles.) The odds were essentially fifty-fifty, yet I felt the tension of a gambler riding a lifelong losing streak. Little has ever come easily for me. Over the years, through trial and error, I have discovered that monkey wrenches abound in this fluky, tricked-up world of ours. (Typos slip into my scholarship. Herbie retrieved fourteen phony checks from under my mattress, plus several other highly compromising documents.)
“Poor unlucky Tommy,” Lorna Sue once said. “Born to lose.”
To calm myself, I dined again one evening with the punkish young Carla, who had taken the standard shine to me. (No surprise. Why ask why?) Although the girl was twenty-some years my junior, with a mentality to match, I found it relaxing to nod at her callow chitchat, to feel our knees in sporadic contact beneath the dinner table. I explained to her—in no uncertain terms—that my heart resided elsewhere, but this information only served to energize Carla’s already vigorous libido. After dessert, on some brash and flimsy pretext, the tart little lemon drop invited herself up to my room, where we spent an agreeable two hours discussing techniques of vengeance. My companion, I must say, was creative in this regard. She knew the ins and outs of physical reprisal; she had a keen, uncanny eye for the possibilities opened by the advent of AIDS. “The simpler the better,” Carla said at one point. “Envelopes, for instance. Nothing to it.”
“Envelopes?” I said, and lifted an eyebrow. “Please elaborate.”
My iron maiden nodded. “The self-addressed kind. All you do is, you brush a little poison on the flap. Arsenic, maybe. After that,
it’s easy. Your victim licks the flap, puts on a stamp, and sends you back the evidence. A day later he’s in the morgue. You’re home free.”
“Elegant,” I murmured.
“You bet,” said Carla. “And I’ve got a million ideas just like it. Better ones.”
She kicked off her shoes and sat beside me on the bed. For our night out, the sweet little assassin had dyed her hair a blinding shade of yellow. She wore a leather vest, leather skirt, leather earrings, a heavy chain belt at her waist.
“Fingernail polish,” she continued grimly. “That’s another one. Two drops of cyanide in the bottle, maybe three, then sit back and watch your mark start biting her fucking fingernails. Zappo. Funeral time.” She glanced at my lower torso, then even farther southward. “Think of all the ridiculous shit people stick in their mouths.”
It was appropriate, I reckoned, to change the subject. I waited a moment and then innocently inquired about the serpentine tattoo etched upon her abdomen.
“Oh, that,” Carla said, and shrugged. “My ex-boyfriend’s idea. Like I told you, he’s history. Motorcycle wreck, piss-poor brakes.” She sighed and unzipped her leather vest. “All right, then, if you dig tattoos, I guess you can take a look. But no touchies. You’re an old, old man.”
“Forty-nine,” I told her. (Accurately enough for the occasion.)
“Right. Ancient. Hands off.”
As it turned out, my companion amounted to a living mural of the flesh, and for some time I happily toured her bodily flora and fauna. I noted a honking goose at her left hip. A set of fangs on her inner thigh. Dragons (male and female) on the arches of her bony brown feet. A red rose at her breast.
It was the rose, alas, that I impulsively plucked.
Out of sorrow.
Without the least carnal motive.
(And who could fault me? I was the ill-fated Achilles, the rose my tender heel.)
Within an instant I recognized my error, yet the volatile little
hellcat had already seized my thumb and forefinger. I will not repeat the girl’s language. Inventive obscenities. Strident free verse. The gist of it had to do with allegations of attempted rape—patently trumped up—along with several unwholesome phrases regarding my status as a dirty old man. (Which I most emphatically was not. I was clean as a whistle and far from elderly.)
“No fucking touchies!” Carla yelled. “Didn’t I
tell
you that?”
“Yes, of course, but I assumed—”
“Assumed! Just because I was nice to you. An old fart! And now I suppose you want to bite it, don’t you? I suppose you want to
chew
.”
I was perplexed. I shook my head diagonally.
“So what does
that
mean?” said Carla. “Yes or no?”
I nodded.
“No,” I said.
“Come on, don’t be such a namby-pamby.” She arched her back, aimed the rose at me. “Make up your mind. Which
is
it?”
Here, I realized, was a sweetmeat with difficulties.
I had no inkling as to the proper response—yea or nay, or both, or neither. (What is it that women
want
? I will never know.) In this instance, alas, my dilemma was compounded by the proximity of the rose tattoo. Not to mention its anatomic location. Not to mention the import of the very word:
rose
.
I took what seemed the wisest course. I remained silent. Mute as a coffin.
Yet even this proved inadequate.
“Creep!” cried Carla.
The girl stood up and moved swiftly to the door—a blur of yellow hair and heavy metal.
“Guys like you,” she snarled, “should be shot through the heart. Butchered like sheep. Someday, man, you’ll get
yours
. Maybe tonight.”
She departed in haste.
I will confess that sleep came hard that night. For the duration of the evening, and well into the gateway hours of the morrow, I remained vigilant, door chained and bolted, eyes wide open.
The truth, I fear, is that young Carla—like such female forebears as Lorna Sue and the original apple-laden Eve—had presented to me a question that admitted of no appropriate response.
Yes
implied perversion.
No
implied absence of interest.
Maybe
implied weakness. Silence implied creephood.
The game of life had been rigged.
Stacked decks, shaved cards. Lorna Sue had it right: Poor unlucky Tommy.
On my final night in Tampa, all but resigned to failure, I tailed Lorna Sue and her ridiculous buffoon-tycoon to a nearby shopping mall. After my experience with Carla, I was in something of a funk—restless, suicidal—as I waited in the mall’s parking lot for the happy couple to complete their shopping. More than an hour passed before they reappeared, each laden with packages. They were laughing, plainly charmed by themselves. As they approached the Mercedes, the tycoon passed over his keys to Lorna Sue, who opened the driver’s door and began to slip inside. Up to that point, nothing even remotely remarkable had occurred. But in the next instant, I knew with perfect certainty that the evening would turn interesting.
It happened fast—too fast. I could barely get the binoculars focused.
Lorna Sue dropped one of her bundles. She cursed. She bent down, made a short, jerky motion with her shoulders, seemed to hesitate, then reached under the seat and pulled out the purple panties.
It was a pleasure, I must confess, to watch her lips form an oval.
How do I describe my delight as she pressed the panties to her nose? As she inhaled? As the stench of treachery swept into her lungs?
After a second Lorna Sue reached down again, retrieved the matching brassiere, and spread it out across the steering wheel as if to measure its potential occupants. (Unfortunately, even with the binoculars, I could not make out her expression. This was evening,
remember, and shadows had fallen.) Perhaps she murmured something. Perhaps she closed her eyes. All I can report with any accuracy is the deliberation with which she draped the panties and bra over the rearview mirror, and how, with considerably more deliberation—at half speed, it seemed—she then pulled out the leg irons.
The tycoon slumped down beside her.
My view was oblique. Profiles, mostly. Nonetheless, I decided that here was a marriage in trouble.
No smooching on the ride home.
Always the reckless motorist, Lorna Sue now outperformed herself at the wheel, and after the first mile or so I lost her in traffic. Not that it mattered. An important event had finally gone well in my life, even better than well, and I was giddy with pride. (So elegant! So simple and satisfying! In times of grief why gobble chocolates and cry your eyes out? Consider the alternatives—maybe a ticket to Fiji.)
For me, of course, it was only a start.
If this modest, impromptu experiment could yield such results, what might be accomplished with proper planning?
I drove slowly, enjoying the night air. The city of Tampa now seemed a more hospitable place. When I arrived at Lorna Sue’s handsome mock-Tudor residence, I was not at all surprised to find the Mercedes parked at an odd angle on the front lawn, headlights blazing, doors ajar. For a few transcendent minutes I sat studying the house, imagining the scene that had to be unfolding within: allegations and rebuttals and disbelief. Lorna Sue’s reptile stare. Bewildered denials. Acrimony at every turn.