Calypso

7

He knew she was on the island, he had heard the launch pulling into the dock more than an hour ago, but she had not yet come to see him, and he wondered about this, wondered if he’d done something to displease her. She had left the island shortly after she’d fed him on Friday night, and he had not been fed since. The clock on the wall — a new acquisition he’d had to beg for — read 9:15. He’d had no breakfast today, and no lunch, and he wondered now if she was going to forget about dinner, too. Sometimes, he cursed the clock. Without the clock, there had been an almost blissful sense of disorientation. Minutes faded into hours to become days and then weeks and months. And years. He had looked up at the clock when he’d heard the launch last night — 8:30 P.M., which meant that she’d be on the mainland by 9:00, that’s how long the trip took, a half hour. Figure close to two hours into the city, she’d have been in Isola by a little before 11:00.

He wondered where she went in the city, wondered about her life outside this room and off this island. He had seen her in the city only once, the night they’d met, and that had been seven years ago — she had let him keep a calendar before she allowed him to have the clock. He would try to count the days, but there were no windows in the room and he never knew when the sun had risen or when it was setting. In the first year, he miscalculated by a month. He thought it was Easter. By his reckoning, trying to keep time without a clock, marking off by guesswork the days on the calendar, he thought it was Easter already. She laughed and told him it was only February the twelfth, he’d been there only five months, was he growing tired of her so soon?

The room — his cage, he called it — was perhaps fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long, he had paced it off the first time she’d locked him in here. He had been on the island only a week then, and had told her he wanted to go back to the mainland, and she’d said, Sure, she just wanted to make a phone call, why didn’t he mix himself a drink, relax a bit, she wouldn’t be a minute. He trusted her then; this was after a week of fucking their brains out all over the house — her bedroom, the living room floor, the kitchen with her bare ass on the countertop and her legs wrapped around his waist, the playroom, and this room, which had been a guest room before it became his cage and which — she told him — had been a psychiatrist’s office before she bought the house. That explained the double doors.

The doors were massive, made of sturdy oak, one opening into the room with the knob on the left, the other opening out with the knob on the right. If you were inside the room and you opened the first door, you found yourself smack up against the second door. This was for privacy. When the psychiatrist owned the house, he didn’t want anyone to hear the rantings of the crazy people who paid him $60 an hour to lie on his couch. Thick double doors. Piano hinges on each of the doors, you couldn’t take out any pins and lift the doors off their hinges because there weren’t any exposed pins to take out. Locks on both doors, the inside one and the outer one. No windows on any of the walls because this was a room that had been part of a big cinder-block, rectangular-shaped basement with the furnace in one corner before the psychiatrist built some walls around the furnace and divided the remaining space into equal halves — the playroom next door, where Santo had fucked her on the pool table the first week he was here, and this room, his cage, that had once been the psychiatrist’s office, but was now a proper guest room with a wall unit opposite the bed, and a couch against one of the walls, and pictures on the walls, and the big double bed itself of course, and the private bathroom with a sink, a toilet, and a tub.

“Sure,” she’d told him, “you just relax, make yourself a drink. I have these phone calls to get off my mind, and then well hop in the boat and I’ll take you back to the mainland, okay, sweetie?” Sure, sweetie. He’d gone to the bar that was part of the wall unit opposite the bed, and he’d mixed himself a scotch and soda, and then he’d sat on the couch listening to the stereo. This was seven years ago, the record collection was old even then, most of the tunes going back a long, long time. She hadn’t replaced any of the records in the past seven years; he listened to the same stuff over and over again, the records worn and scratchy now, the way he was worn and scratchy, seven years, seven years in this room. But that night long ago, after they’d spent a week together out here on the island, beautiful that September, woman with her own private little island off Sands Spit, man, he was impressed! Couldn’t get enough of him, told him she was twenty-eight years old, but he saw a college graduation picture of her in the living room, and there was a date on the back of it, and he figured a person graduated college when they were twenty-two, right? Well, maybe younger if they were real smart, so okay give her the benefit of the doubt, say she graduated when she was twenty, nobody graduated college younger than twenty, which according to the date on the back of the graduation picture would’ve made her thirty-two years old and not what she claimed to be, not twenty-eight like she claimed. Which made her thirty-nine years old now, an old lady.

Where was his dinner, wasn’t she gonna bring him no dinner tonight, was she going to starve him the way she did for two weeks that time he almost escaped? Would’ve made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the dog. She knew he was scared of dogs, he’d told her so, pillow talk during their first week together, terrified of dogs, you know what I mean? When I was eight years old, I got bit by a dog on the roof. Goddamn fox terrier, guy had taken him up on the roof to do his business, fuckin mutt came at me and tore a piece out of my leg. I had to get rabies shots, you ever have rabies shots? Christ, the pain. I been scared of dogs ever since, I shit in my pants a dog even comes near me. He was over the wall and out when she let the dog loose — big German shepherd, came after him with his fangs bared, knocked him to the ground, he went tumbling over in the tall sea grass at the ocean’s edge, clawing at the dog’s big head, trying to keep those teeth away from him, the ocean pounding in, her voice coming in over the roar of the surf, “No, Clarence, no,” some fuckin name for a killer German shepherd, Clarence! Picked up the dog’s leash in one hand, and told Santo to head back for the house like a nice little boy, saw where he’d picked the locks on both doors and locked him in the bathroom for the night, with the dog sitting just outside the door. All night long, he could hear the dog growling. She starved Santo for the next two weeks, as punishment for having tried to escape, and when finally she fed him again, there was something in the food — it knocked him out completely. He didn’t know how long he was out, but when he woke up there were new locks on both doors, dead-bolt locks, he couldn’t have picked them even if he was a pro. And from then on, the dog was always outside those big double doors, sitting in the hallway.

But that was later, that was — he kept losing track of time. The first time she’d locked him in here, yes, he was listening, yes, to her records, and sipping at his scotch, just digging the sound and thinking he’d be back in the city again soon, playing another gig with Georgie and the guys, sipping, smiling, and then becoming aware of time all at once, looking at his wristwatch and realizing she’d been gone a good half hour. Well, leave it to a woman, goes to make a few phone calls and takes forever. Smiling, he got off the couch and went to the door and twisted the knob the way he would have ordinarily, not suspecting a thing yet, and then discovering the door was locked, she had locked the door on him. He began yelling for her to come unlock the door, but if she heard him, she didn’t come do it. He doubted if she heard him, anyway, through those big double mothers. She didn’t come back till the next morning, to bring him a tray of breakfast. She had a gun when she came into the room, he didn’t know whether she’d had it in the house here all along, or whether she’d taken the boat over to the mainland to buy it. He didn’t know anything about guns, he couldn’t tell one caliber of gun from another. But this didn’t look like no dainty little gun a lady would keep in her handbag. This looked like a gun could blow a man’s head off. She told him to back away from the door, and he said, “Hey, come on, what is this?” and she wagged the gun at him and just said, “Back.” Then she put the breakfast tray on the floor and said, “There’s your food, eat it,” and went out, locking both doors behind her.

That breakfast was the first time she put anything in his food. He drank his orange juice, and then he ate his cornflakes and drank his coffee, and he didn’t know which of the things he ate or drank was doped, but something was because he passed out cold almost immediately afterward, and when he woke up again — he didn’t know how many hours later — he was naked on the bed, all his clothes gone, his wristwatch gone, his wrists tied together behind his back, and his feet tied together at the ankles. He started yelling for her again. But again, he didn’t know whether she could hear him through those double doors. Anyway, he was beginning to understand that she would come to him only when she wanted to. There was no sense yelling or screaming, there was no sense doing anything except trying to figure a way out.

He knew what the island looked like; she’d shown him around it during that first week when he was still a guest and not a prisoner, fucked her on the boat and on the beach, fucked her in the little pine forest that ran along the southern shore, fucked her day and night, never met a woman like her in his life, and told her so. But, you know, he missed, the city, wanted to get back to the city — “Are you getting tired of me?” she asked. “No, no, just want to walk those streets again, you know, hear those sidewalks humming under my feet, huh, baby? I’m a city boy, born and raised there, my mom’s from Venezuela and my pop’s from Trinidad — haven’t seen him since I was three and he took off with a girl used to waitress up in Diamondback — but me and my brother Georgie are one hundred percent American Yankee-Doodle Dandy boys, yessir,” he said, and burst out laughing. “Stay just another day,” she said.

That first week, she told him her daddy had bought the island for her when she was sixteen, a birthday present; you’re the only sixteen-year-old girl in the world who has her own private island, Daddy had told her. Santo pictured him as some kind of asshole rich guy with white duck pants and a double-breasted blue blazer, white yachting cap on his head, “Here you are, darlin, here’s your own private island” — while people all over the world were digging in garbage cans for food. Built her a house on the island when she got married, told his daughter she ought to have a little place where she could get away from it all, little seaside hideaway half an hour from the mainland, only it wasn’t so little — there were four bedrooms in the place, not to mention the playroom in the basement and the guest room that used to be the psychiatrist’s—

That was the first time he caught her lying. That was during the first week; he wasn’t even her prisoner then, they were still, you know, making it day and night and promising undying love to each other. He caught the lie, and he said, “Hey, how come if your daddy bought you this island when you were sixteen, and then he built this house for you when you were twenty-one and got married — then how come you told me you bought this house from a man who used to be a psychiatrist and who put those big double doors in downstairs so nobody could hear his patients yelling they’re Napoleon, how come, huh?”

So she admitted then that she hadn’t bought the house from a psychiatrist at all, she had in fact been married to the psychiatrist who’d put in those big double doors downstairs so that his patients could feel free to divulge the deepest secrets of their labyrinthine pasts without being overheard by anyone. It still sounded very fishy to Santo, and he told her so. This was on the fourth day, he guessed it was. This was when they were still eating, drinking, and making merry. She finally told him the truth the next day, or at least he guessed it was the truth, he couldn’t really say for sure. They were walking on the beach. He was wearing an old sweater she’d loaned him, said it had belonged to her psychiatrist husband, who wasn’t a psychiatrist at all — but of course he didn’t know that until after she’d told him the truth. There were gulls circling a dead fish that had washed ashore, raising a terrible racket, white and gray against the clear September sky, their beaks a more intense yellow than the pale gold of the sunshine in which they floated. The ocean was very calm. Her voice was very calm, too.

She told him it was true that her father had bought the island for her when she was sixteen, and she told him it was further true that he’d built the house here for her and her husband when they got married. “When I was twenty-one,” she said, “I’m twenty-eight now,” which was another lie, but he didn’t discover that one until he looked at the back of the graduation picture in the living room and saw the date. Anyway, the way she was telling it now, her husband left her after they’d been married only six months, just picked up and left her one day, and she’d had this, well, what you might call a nervous breakdown. Her father refused to have her committed to a hospital, so he arranged for private care in the house here on the island, which was when he had the double doors installed, both of them with locks on them. So that she wouldn’t hurt herself. She became suicidal, you see. When her husband left her. She tried committing suicide several times. The double doors, securely locked, were for her own protection. A nurse sat outside them day and night. This was when she was still twenty-one, and her husband left her.

Santo listened to all this and thought, Well, I hooked onto a real bedbug this time, but he expressed sympathy for all she’d been through, poor kid, and asked her how she was feeling now, and she said, “Can’t you tell how I’m feeling? I’m feeling marvelous!” He supposed that was true, she certainly looked healthy and strong and she fucked like a jackrabbit, but he’d once known a mentally retarded girl in Diamondback who everybody on the block used to fuck, take her up on the roof and fuck her, and whereas she didn’t have all her marbles when it came to arithmetic or spelling, she sure knew how to jazz a man clean out of his mind. Which might be the same with this girl, this woman really, said she was twenty-eight, but he knew she was thirty-two — she might be somebody who still ought to be kept behind locked doors except when she was fucking her brains out, which if she had her way she’d have done day and night through Christmas, except he told her he had to get back to the mainland.

Took him thirty seconds to realize he was a prisoner. If she hadn’t told him that story about the breakdown and the locked double doors, he’d have maybe thought, Well, the woman’s havin a little sport with me, she’s got me locked in here, but she’s gonna come down here in just a little while wearin only a black garter belt and mesh stockings and high-heeled patent-leather pumps, and she’s just gonna squirt whipped cream all over me and eat me up alive and beg my pardon for playin such a bad joke on me, makin me think I was a prisoner here. That’s what he might have thought if she hadn’t just two days earlier told him the story about going bonkers when her husband left right after they got married. She might have been lying about that, too, but he didn’t think somebody lied about having a mental breakdown. No, this room he found himself in — this prison, this cage — used to be her prison, her cage with a nurse sitting outside it, maybe ready with a straitjacket or a shot of something to knock her out, who the hell knew? And now he was the prisoner, and she was outside there, putting dope in his food whenever she wanted to, and coming to the room to pass the time of day with him, and showing him the big mother German shepherd the very day she bought him, which was three days after she locked him in — this was after she’d doped his food the first time, and he was lying bound hand and foot on the bed. The doors opened and she brought in the German shepherd, fuckin thing looked like a grizzly bear, he was that big. Santo backed away from him, and she smiled, the bitch, showing her even white teeth, tossing her long blond hair. “Don’t be frightened, sweetie,” she said, “Clarence is the gentlest human being on earth.” Clarence! And Clarence growled deep in his throat the way gentle human beings never do, man, he growled and those black lips of his or whatever you call them, that soft black flesh around the mouth drew back to show teeth that had to be six inches long, each and every one of them. The gentlest human being on earth looked like he was ready to tear a big fat hunk of meat out of Santo’s leg or maybe leap for his throat and rip out his windpipe. And she smiled. She smiled, the bitch. “Clarence is going to be on the island from now on,” she said. And later, after he tried to escape that first time and the dog came after him, later she told him that Clarence was going to be sitting outside his room from now on, just the way her nurse used to sit out there when she was having the trouble that time. “If there’s anything you need,” she said, smiling, “you just ask Clarence.” Smiling.

At first, Santo thought he could hold out on her. Okay, you bitch, you want to keep me prisoner on this fuckin island with a fuckin German shepherd roaming the grounds, okay, you know what you’re gonna get from me? You’re gonna get this, sister, that’s what you’re gonna get, you’re gonna get nothin, zero, zilch, nada, bubkes, that’s what! But when she came in to make love that first time — this was maybe two or three weeks after she bought the dog — she locked the doors behind her, both doors, and then hung the keys on Clarence’s collar, and said, “Sit, Clarence,” and the fuckin mutt sat just inside the door, and watched her as she walked to the bed. She was wearing a pale blue nightgown, nothing under it, he could see her body through the thin nylon, a beautiful body, it was her body that had attracted him to her in the first place, tall and slender, with good breasts and long legs, she came to the bed and sat on the edge of it and said, “Don’t you want to make love, Santo?” and he told her he didn’t want to make love, he wouldn’t make love to anybody who kept him prisoner with a goddamn dog named Clarence ready to bite him, get the dog out of here, get out of here yourself, I don’t want to make love to a bitch like you!

But... you know... it had been almost three weeks already, three weeks since he’d had any woman at all, three weeks since they’d been going at it day and night, and here she was now, crawling onto the bed beside him, and wriggling out of the gown, and then taking him in her hands, and then in her mouth, and then suddenly moving away from him, rolling onto her back and throwing her legs wide the way she had that night in the kitchen, and suddenly he was on top of her and not caring whether he was her prisoner or her slave or whatever, only wanting her, wanting her, and hating himself for wanting her.

He dreamed constantly of escape. He held back a fork from his tray one time — she never let him have a knife, the bitch, his food was always cut for him when she brought it in — kept the fork and tried digging a hole in the bathroom wall, get out of this fuckin room into the basement, get around the dog somehow, but the fork broke on the cinder block, and when she found it missing later, she punished him again, there was always the punishment when he did something wrong, something she thought was wrong. Another time, he pretended he was sick, stuck his finger down his throat and vomited all over the floor, told her he thought he had appendicitis or something, figured if he could get her to call a doctor... but no, she told him no doctor, she made him wipe up the vomit, he said he was going to die, she said, “No, you’re not going to die.” Always dreaming of escape. Get out of here, get to the boat. Get free.

He heard a key turning in the inner door. He waited. The door opened. She stood there holding Clarence’s leash in one hand. She smiled, led Clarence into the room, said, “Sit, Clarence,” and then went out into the corridor for Santo’s tray of food. She carried it to the coffee table in front of the couch, put it down, and — still smiling — said, “Are you hungry, sweetie?”

He did not answer her. He sat immediately and began eating.

“Did you miss me?” she asked.

He still said nothing. He continued wolfing down the food. From across the room, just inside the door, Clarence sat on his haunches and watched.

“I had some business to take care of in the city,” she said.

“I’m not interested,” he said.

“I thought you might be.”

“I’m not.”

She shrugged, went to the door, and took the dog’s leash in her hand again.

“I’ll be back later,” she said.

“You ever wonder what would happen if you should die?” he asked suddenly, looking up from the food on his tray. “I’d starve to death in here, do you realize that?”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “But don’t worry, sweetie, we’ve got a good long life ahead of us.”

He said nothing.

“What shall I wear later?” she asked.

“I don’t care what you wear,” he said.

“What’s your favorite? I want to make you happy tonight.”

“You can make me happy by leaving me alone.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe it, it’s true.”

“Shall I wear the black wig?”

“I told you I don’t care.”

“Finish your dinner,” she said. “I’ll surprise you, all right? I’ll wear something you’ve never seen before.”

“If you want to surprise me, you’ll come in later and tell me I’m a free man.”

“No, I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I need you, Santo.”

“I want to leave here.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“I’m going crazy here. If you keep me here any longer, I’ll go out of my mind. I’ll die, do you understand? I’ll die in this room.”

“You won’t die,” she said, and smiled again. “Not unless I want you to die. Please remember that, Santo.” She looked up at the clock. “I’ll be back in an hour. Will you be ready for me in an hour?”

“No.”

“Be ready,” she said.

“I hate you,” he said softly.

“You love me,” she answered, and smiled again. She was leaving the room when she seemed to remember something. She turned, looked at him, and said, “Oh, by the way — C.J. won’t be visiting us anymore.”