Small Town

twenty

Harbinger of doom, the papers called him. Harbinger the Carpenter.

There but for the grace of God, thought Susan Pomerance, go all my favorite artists.

She wasn’t following the unfolding story that intently, the way the rest of the city seemed to be. Chloe, for one, seemed capable of talking of little else. Every new development, every further revelation about the city’s greatest nightmare, informed the girl’s every utterance. The losses the man had suffered, his son and daughter and son-in-law, all killed when the towers came down. And then his wife dying, probably of a broken heart, and was it any wonder he cracked?

Without reading much of the newspaper coverage, without spending much time watching television or listening to any radio news beyond WQXR’s hourly summary, she nevertheless found herself aware of most of the story’s developments.

She heard about the increasing body of evidence suggesting he’d simply walked away from his apartment, turned the key in the lock, and disappeared. He hadn’t collected his mail, after all; instead, he’d rented a post office box and had all his mail forwarded to it. He’d paid rent on the box for three months in advance, and never paid anything further, nor was there any indication that he’d ever visited the box to collect his mail. After several past-due notices went unanswered, a clerk opened his box, marked the first-class mail to be returned to sender, and discarded the rest.

He’d evidently lived in a series of flophouses, all of them in the general vicinity of Penn Station. Why, people wondered, would a man walk away from a comfortable apartment, filled with his furniture and the possessions of a lifetime, to live in a squalid furnished room with the bathroom down the hall?

Susan didn’t find it that incomprehensible. That was one of the things people did when they were in the process of withdrawing, of turning inside. For a fortunate handful, the energies that made them turn inward were somehow magically channeled into art. Instead of walking onto a factory floor with an AK-47, instead of taking off all their clothes in the subway, instead of murdering their children in their beds, or drinking oven cleaner, or lying down in front of the Metroliner, they painted a picture or fashioned a sculpture. They made art.

And wasn’t all art created to preserve the artist’s sanity? Didn’t they all make art the way oysters made pearls? A grain of sand got into the oyster’s shell, which was to say under his skin, and it irritated him, it chafed him. So the oyster secreted something, squeezed out some essence of its own self, and coated the offending grain of sand with it, just to stop the pain. Layer after layer of this mystical substance the oyster brought forth, until the grain of sand and the pain it had occasioned were not even a memory.

The by-product of the oyster’s relief was the shimmering beauty of the pearl. And every pearl, every single luminous gem, had at the core of its being a grain of irritation.

If William Boyce Harbinger, Harbinger the Carpenter, had been able to so channel his own furious energies, then the roots of his discontent might have brought forth life instead of death. And yet, she thought, you could argue that Harbinger was making his own kind of art, composing it of death and destruction.

He knew so many unusual facts about New York, a neighbor had told a CNN reporter. How the streets were named, and some forgotten event that had taken place on a certain corner a hundred years ago. And a former coworker had confirmed that Harbinger’s only after-hours pastime that he knew of was the study of the city’s history. “He loved New York,” an op-ed columnist theorized, “and the city betrayed him, taking his loved ones from him all in a single horrible morning. And now he is getting his horrible twisted revenge.”

Perhaps, she thought. But perhaps not. Perhaps the city he loved was his canvas, and he was striving to paint his masterpiece in blood and fire.

Whatever the foundation for the Carpenter’s acts, it was unarguable that the man was obsessed. He hadn’t just suddenly lost his temper. He was, if not an artist, unquestionably a craftsman, from the planning of his projects through the selection of his tools to the execution of the finished work. And he managed all this because he was a man obsessed.

She knew a little about that.

She found herself these days in the grip of not one but three obsessions; rather than conflict with one another, they seemed to her to be complementary. Honoring all three of them, serving all three of them, she maintained her sanity.

The first, and surely it was the one that would be most easily justified to the world at large, was her increasing obsession with the works of Emory Allgood. She’d set firm dates now for the one-man show she was giving him. It would open on Saturday, November 2, and would be up for two weeks.

In preparation for the show, she found herself making frequent visits to her storage space, sometimes with no apparent purpose beyond that of familiarizing herself with the work, of absorbing its essence. She had responded unequivocally to Allgood’s constructions from the beginning, and her certainty of its merit only grew greater over time.

One piece drew her more than the others. This didn’t mean it was better, only that it had something special about it that worked particularly well for her. The central element of it had begun life as a spool, shaped like a spool of thread in a sewing cabinet but much larger — precisely thirty-two inches high, with the flanges twenty-one inches in diameter. The core, itself some ten inches thick, was of pine, the flanges of half-inch fir plywood.

Once it had held wire or cable of some sort, wrapped around its core like sewing thread around an inch-long spool. Now it held — what? The sins of the world, that would be her guess.

He’d mounted it on what must have been the steel base of some sort of low stool, and had driven all manner of objects into the wooden spool. The effect was not unlike that of West African nail fetishes, where an upended log, sometimes but not always carved into a human form, was pierced hundreds upon hundreds of times with nails — or, in one example she’d seen at the Brooklyn Museum, with the blades of knives, all of them rusted.

Like most African tribal pieces, the nail fetishes were art only in the Western viewer’s perception; like the masks and shields and drums that filled museums and important collections, they were purely functional in the eyes of those who made them. She’d long since forgotten the purpose of the nail fetishes, if she’d ever been clear on it in the first place, and she couldn’t hope to guess what had prompted a wild-eyed little black man in Brooklyn to stab knives and forks into the wooden spool, to pound nails and screws and miscellaneous bits of hardware into it, to screw in a brass doorstop here, the wooden knobs from a chest of drawers there. Why had he done it — and, most mysterious of all, how had he managed in the process to create not a mad jumble, not a discordant conglomeration of junk, but an artifact of surpassing beauty?

The Sins of the World — that’s what she would call it, and it would be on the cover of the exhibition catalog and on the postcards as well. She was positive someone would snatch it up, couldn’t imagine Gregory Schuyler letting it get away from him, but she didn’t know if she could bear to part with it. She might find she needed to hang on to it.

In the meantime, it had migrated from her storage bin to her living room, where it occupied a place of honor. There she was able to confirm that it wasn’t just her, that others responded to it in much the same way she did. You couldn’t just walk past it. It grabbed your lapels, demanding attention.

And it received rather more attention these days than it might have at an earlier time, not because it had changed, not even because the world had changed. It was simply seen by more people now, because her apartment was receiving more visitors than it had in the past.

And that, of course, was the result of her second obsession.

Her sex life, she was quite certain, was sane and manageable. She had to keep reassuring herself of this, however, because it was without doubt a far cry from what society regarded as either sane or manageable. She was having sex when she wanted, with whomever she wanted, in whatever fashion she desired.

If she were a man, she sometimes thought, what she was doing would be seen as demonstrating no end of good, even wholesome male qualities. The only way a man could engage in sexual behavior that the world would deem excessive was if he forced himself on others, took his pleasure with children, or caught a fatal disease in the course of his adventures. (And even the latter was only punishment for his transgressions if he caught it from another man; if he got it from a woman, it was just the worst kind of bad luck.)

On the other hand, it was easier to do it in the first place if you were a woman. If you were reasonably attractive, and if you presented yourself well, you really weren’t going to have a great deal of trouble finding some man who would like nothing better than to go home with you and fuck your brains out. He might not be terribly good at it, and he might never call you again, but if all you were looking for was to get laid, well, how hard was that?

Women knocked themselves out trying to attract men, and all they really had to be was available. A man did not care who made your shoes, or if they matched your bag, and if he even noticed such matters he was probably not in any event going to be the man you wanted to take home. A man did not pay attention to your earrings (unless you were wearing them someplace other than your ears) and had no idea what you paid for your dress. His concerns were more basic. Did you have tits? Did you have an ass? Did you have a mouth? Did you have a pussy? Were any or all of these available to him? Fine. I love you. Let’s go to bed.

The night with Fran Buckram, a delicious experience in its own right, had given her a sense of her own power. Here was this man, this unquestionably manly man, this leader of men, and he had let her do whatever she wanted with him. Franny she’d called him, and made a girl of him and fucked him like a girl. And made him like it. And afterward, with the rules suspended and her dominance put aside, she’d gone on calling him Franny, and he hadn’t asked her to stop.

“I’ll see you next Friday,” she had told him at the door. “I don’t think we need to meet anywhere, do you? Come here at eight. And, Franny? Don’t bring flowers.”

Tuesday afternoon she had a call at the gallery. “Susan? This is Jay McGann, we met at Stelli’s the other night.”

“I remember.”

“I’ve been working all day and I need a break. I thought I might come over and look at some art.”

“That would be nice,” she said. “Why don’t you bring your friend?”

“My friend?”

“Your editor. Isn’t he your friend as well?”

“Oh, Lowell? Yes, friend and editor, but the poor guy’s got to work for a living. I don’t think he can get away from his desk at this hour.”

“Come this evening,” she said.

“Are you open nights?”

“I could arrange to be,” she said, “but actually I have some of the best work at my apartment. You’d be getting a look at something the public doesn’t get to see.”

“I’d like that,” he said. “And I could get away tonight.”

“Call Lowell. See if he can make it.”

He couldn’t figure it out, and she was in no rush to help him. After a pause he said, “Uh, actually I’d hoped we could get acquainted.”

“Yes, I feel the same.”

“So it would really be more convenient, you know, if it was just the two of us.”

“It was so nice meeting the two of you the other night,” she said. “The way you interacted was very pleasing.”

“Yes, but—”

“So I think it would be really nice to get intimately acquainted with both of you.”

“Oh. Uh, whew. Uh, would you want one of us to bring a girlfriend?”

“Whatever for?”

“Uh...”

“Jay,” she said, “don’t you think I can make you both very happy all by myself?”

She went home and showered and put on the same dress she’d worn Friday night, knowing it looked good with nothing under it. They showed up together at a quarter to seven, a whiff of Scotch on their breath from the drink each had needed to get that far. She knew they wanted her, knew they couldn’t believe it was really going to happen. And, of course, they had to be possessed by the usual performance anxiety, magnified by the need to perform in front of another male, and a friend in the bargain.

She began by showing them the art, and was pleased by the intelligence and perception evident in their reactions. They didn’t need to be aesthetes, she just wanted to fuck them, but it made things better when there was a mind operating the body. All the standard fantasies about brutish macho studs notwithstanding, bright and sensitive men were almost always better in bed.

Emory Allgood’s piece drew the most interest, and one of them wanted to know the price. She explained that it wasn’t for sale, but that the artist had a show opening in the fall. She’d make sure they got invitations to the opening.

Enough, she thought.

“It’s so nice to see you both,” she said, and brushed the back of her hand across Jay McGann’s crotch, then flung her arms around Lowell Cooke’s neck and gave him a lingering openmouthed kiss. She thought Jay might grope her while she was kissing Lowell, but no, he was just standing there politely, waiting his turn. She turned from Lowell and kissed Jay, and felt Lowell’s hands on her ass.

In the bedroom, they gaped at her when she got out of the black dress, gaped again at the gold at her nipples and the hairless pubic mound. They stripped without embarrassment, and there was another round of kissing with hands reaching everywhere, and then they were all three in her bed.

Men always wanted a threesome with two women, it was the closest thing they had to a universal fantasy, but what was the sense of it? A man only had one cock, and could only put it in one place at a time. Oh, yes, there were possibilities in foreplay, and then he could eat one girl while he fucked the other, and in the process cheat each out of the benefit of his full attention. It could be interesting for a woman, being with a man and woman at once, but for a man how could the reality ever be a match for the fantasy?

With two men and a woman, on the other hand, the physiology was equal to the fantasy. She had a mouth, she had an ass, she had a cunt — there was more than enough of her to keep them occupied.

It was divine, and utterly different from her night with Buckram. (Sweet Franny!) She’d got things going, then was able to be essentially passive and let them use her as they wished, turning her this way and that, learning her body with their hands, their mouths. Lowell slipping into her, Jay offering himself to her mouth.

In the end, she did manage to fulfill a longstanding fantasy. The night before, alone with herself and her thoughts and her toys, she’d slipped the smallest dildo into her ass, a larger one in her pussy. And now it was happening again, but this time her toys were alive, and she didn’t have to manipulate them, she could give herself up utterly to the pleasure of being taken and used, being fucked fore and aft.

But she couldn’t get them to do anything to each other.

Men were so funny. Caught up in passion and need, still they were careful not to touch one another, careful that each made physical contact with her and only with her.

After they’d finished their sexual sandwich, as she lay on her back between them with their seed oozing out of both her holes, she took one of them in each hand and said, “You know what I would love? I would love to see one of you suck the other. I would absolutely love that.”

God, you’d think she’d suggested they dismember a child, or strangle their mothers with a rolled-up American flag. And it was so silly. Moments before, both of them buried in her flesh, they’d been able to feel each other’s cocks through the thin membrane that separated her two passages. That had contributed to her excitement, and, she felt sure, to theirs as well, could they only acknowledge it.

“It would make me so excited,” she said. “I get wet just thinking about it. If you just did that, you could get me to do anything you wanted, anything you could think of.”

But there was the problem — they didn’t want anything from her, now that they’d pumped the last drop of their passion into her. All they really wanted was to shower and dress and go home to their wives, and hope to God the women didn’t pick tonight to feel passionate.

She’d planted the seed, though. She’d given them something to think about. And, when they came around next week, she’d propose some sort of game, some last-to-come contest, with the loser required to give the winner a blow job. And the loser would be a good sport about it, because being a good sport was even more important than being a hundred percent heterosexual, and he’d give in gracefully, and before they knew it they’d both be doing it, and loving it.

What fun.

Sex was wonderful, and the more you did it and the more people you did it with, the better it got. It was readily available, it didn’t cost anything, and it was even good for you. She might have found it impossible to keep it in proportion, and it definitely helped that she had a third obsession.

John Blair Creighton.

She hadn’t realized at first that her fascination with the man who’d strangled her real estate agent, and who seemed to have been rewarded with a multimillion-dollar book contract, was anything more than a desire to go to bed with him. There was, certainly, a healthy (or not) sexual element to the obsession. He was a big, broad-shouldered guy, good-looking but not excessively handsome, and he had a sexual energy she’d have been aware of even if she hadn’t known who he was. She wanted to fuck him — and would, she was sure of it — but there was more to it than that. She was, well, yes, obsessed with the man, and she wasn’t sure why.

But it wasn’t just sexual desire that made her spend hours online, checking out the results of a Google search and downloading everything she could find about him. And sent her to abebooks.com and alibris.com to order copies of all his out-of-print books. And led her to read the books, all of them, one right after the other, to read them cover to cover not just for the stories (which were involving) or the characters (the men convincing, the women a little less so) or the writing (excellent, simple and straightforward, always clear as glass, and with a ring like Waterford). That made reading enjoyable, but it didn’t make it a necessity, something she felt honor-bound to do every night when she wasn’t in bed with somebody.

It couldn’t be because she’d met him. She’d met any number of writers, and the fact of acquaintance was no reason to read their books. She’d not only met Jay McGann, she’d fucked him walleyed, and she was in no great hurry to read anything he’d written.

It had to be because he’d been charged with murder, but that by itself could only take her to the first book. After that, she kept reading because of something in the work itself, and she’d already established it wasn’t the writing or the plot or the characters, so what was left?

The sense that came through of the author. Wasn’t that what made any work of art effective? You got little sidelong glimpses of a soul, and, if it resonated in a certain way with your own, you wanted more.

He was going to be important to her. She knew that much, and, when she thought about it, she had to admit that it was a little scary.

I mean, what if he actually did kill that woman?