Riven Rock

PROLOGUE. 1927, World Without Women

For twenty years, twenty long dull repetitive years that dripped by with the sleepy incessant murmur of water dripping from a gutter, Stanley McCormick never laid eyes on a woman. Not his mother, not his sisters, not his wife. No nurse or librarian, no girl in pigtails on her way to school, no spinster sweeping her porch or housewife haggling with the grocer, no slut, flapper or suffragette. It wasn’t a matter of choice. Stanley loved his mother, his wife, his sisters, he loved other people’s mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, but he loved them too much, loved them with an incendiary passion that was like hate, that was indistinguishable from hate, and it was that loving and hating that fomented all his troubles and thrust him headlong into a world without women.

He was twenty-nine when he married Katherine Dexter, a woman of power, beauty, wealth and prestige, a woman as combative and fierce as his mother, with heartbreaking eyes and a voice so soft and pure it was like a drug, and he was thirty-one when he first felt the cold wolf’s bite of the sheet restraints and entered the solitary world of men. He went blank then. He was blocked. He saw things that weren’t there, desperate, ugly things, creatures of his innermost mind that shone with a life more vivid than any life he’d ever known, and he heard voices speaking without mouths, throats or tongues, and every time he looked up it was into the face of masculinity.

The years accumulated. Stanley turned forty, then fifty. And in all that time he lived in the company of one sex and one sex only — men, with their hairy wrists and bludgeoning eyes, their nagging phlegmy voices and fetid breath and the viscid sweat that glistened in their beards and darkened their shirts under the arms. It was like joining a fraternity that never left the house, entering a monastery, marching in step with the French Foreign Legion over the vast and trackless dunes and not an oasis in sight. And how did Stanley feel about that? No one had bothered to ask. Certainly not Dr. Hamilton — or Dr. Hoch or Dr. Brush or Dr. Meyer either. But if he were to think about it, think about the strangeness and deprivation of it, even for a minute, he would feel as if a black and roiling gulf were opening inside him, as if he were being split in two like a Siamese twin cut away from its other self. He was a husband without a wife, a son without a mother, a brother without sisters.

But why? Why did it have to be like this? Because he was sick, he was very sick, he knew that. And he knew why he was sick. It was because of them, because of the bitches, because of women. They were the ones. And if he ever saw his wife again, if he saw his mother or Anita or Mary Virginia, he knew what he would do, as sure as the sun rises and the world spins on its axis. He would go right up to them, Katherine or Mary Virginia or the president’s wife or any of them, and he would show them what a real man was for, and he would make them pay for it too, he would. That was how it was, and that was why he’d lived for the past nineteen years at Riven Rock, the eighty-seven-acre estate his father’s money had bought him, in his stone mansion with the bars on the windows and the bed bolted to the floor, within sight of the hammered blue shield of the Pacific and the adamantine wall of the Channel Islands, in the original Paradise, the lonely Paradise, the place where no woman walked or breathed.