Small Town

twenty-five

The caller, who’d given his name as if she ought to recognize it, had a straightforward request. Would she, as a gallery owner in Chelsea, be willing to donate a piece of art to be auctioned for the benefit of Chelsea Remembers?

What, she wondered, was that? It couldn’t be the first thing that came to mind, which was a memoir by an ex-president’s daughter. But what the hell was it?

She confessed to an unfamiliarity with the cause, and the caller explained that Chelsea Remembers was an organization formed to raise funds for a memorial to the neighborhood residents, male and female, gay and straight, who had lost their lives in the Carpenter’s savage firebombing spree.

She said, “A memorial? Like a statue?”

“There’s been no decision yet as to what form the memorial might take. A statue is certainly a possibility, but there have been suggestions ranging from special streetlights in front of the three sites to an annual release of doves.”

Ravens, she thought, would better suit the men who’d perished at Death Row. Ravens with just a touch of polish on their talons.

Just say yes, it’s a worthy cause, I’d love to help, she told herself. But something made her say, “Maybe I’m missing something. What’s the point, exactly?”

“The point?”

“I mean, do we have to throw up a monument every time somebody steps in front of a bus? How much bad public sculpture does a city need? I mean—”

The voice turned to ice. “Miss Pomerance, our small community lost eighty-seven members in one utterly horrific hour. The lucky ones were burned to death at once. The others spent hours or days in agony and then died. Still others recovered, and after a few years of skin grafts some of them may actually look halfway human. The point, if you will, would seem to be implicit in the organization’s name. The point is that Chelsea remembers.”

“I—”

But he hadn’t finished. “We can only show our remembrance by doing something. Few of the victims had dependents, so aiding the families of the victims would indeed be pointless. Many were estranged from their families, if they had families at all. This neighborhood was their family, Miss Pomerance, and some memorial, some bad and surely unnecessary piece of public sculpture, would seem to some of us to be a good deal better than nothing.”

“I am terribly sorry,” she said. “Please tell me your name again.”

“It’s Harwood Zeller.”

Oh, God, she did know who he was. He owned several buildings on Ninth Avenue, and operated a restaurant in one of them and an antique shop in another.

“I have to apologize,” she told him. “I don’t know what got into me. Actually I do, I just got off the phone with my mother, and—”

“Say no more. When I get off the phone with my mother, I’m apt to bite people.”

“You’re very gracious, and of course I’ll want to contribute something.”

She got the particulars, made notes, and by the time she got off the phone they were on Woody and Susan terms. She pushed back her chair and tried to figure out what her misplaced burst of candor was going to cost her. If she’d just said yes in the first place she could have made them perfectly happy with one of her mistakes, perhaps a Lynah Throp watercolor. She had a dozen of them moldering in her storage bin, bold primitives of fanciful animals that had impressed her on first sight and had never impressed anyone else, not even a little. She’d never sell them — she’d never display them again, so how could she? — and the chance to unload one and get a tax deduction in the balance was a godsend.

But now she had to give them something decent, something that was certain to bring upwards of a hundred dollars at an auction where most of the bidders wouldn’t pay thirty-five cents to see Christ ride a bicycle.

Hell.

Well, it was her own damn fault. She’d think of something.

Her mother had died almost five years ago, and she offered up a silent apology at having taken her name in vain. It had seemed like the perfect excuse to turn aside the wrath of a pissy little queen like Harwood Zeller, and she had to say it had worked like a charm. But if she’d had any sense she’d never have needed it in the first place.

The real reason for her pique, and one she thought Zeller might well have understood, was even more clichéd. She’d been waiting for a phone call from a man, and it never came.

Her obsession with John Blair Creighton hadn’t ended when she’d run out of books to read. She emerged from his work with the conviction that she knew the man, that they were mated on some sort of psychic level. In Stelli’s, even as she’d apologized for intruding, she’d sent him a message with her eyes, and she knew he’d received it. He’d liked her looks, he’d responded to her, he’d taken the card she’d handed him — and then nothing. He hadn’t called.

And wouldn’t, now. Weeks had passed, and he’d have called in the first few days if he was going to call at all.

She could send him an announcement for Emory Allgood’s show, an invitation to the opening. She could add a handwritten note urging him to come. But he probably got a steady stream of those, like everybody else in Manhattan with a vague interest in or connection to the arts, and would probably discard it without even recognizing her name. Or he’d make a face, thinking Here’s a dame with a lot of crust, first she interrupts my meal, and now she wants to sell me some junk sculpture.

Besides, that wasn’t until November. Why did she have to wait that long?

On the nights when she was alone, she’d developed a ritual that she recognized as pathological even as she found it irresistible. She would bathe, and perfume herself. She’d had enlarged photos made from her two favorite dust jacket pictures of him, one taken outside Village Cigars on Sheridan Square, where he looked marvelously butch in a denim jacket and boots and a beard, the other a studio shot twenty years old, a portrait of the author as a young man, fresh-faced and innocent. These she placed on her bedside table, and lit the little lamp so she could see them.

Then she would touch herself while her mind occupied itself with the fantasy she had selected during her bath. Sometimes it was simple enough — she was Susan and he was John, and they loved with a love that was more than love, di dah di dah di dah.

Other times she became one or another of the female characters in his books, and played out scenes that departed from those he’d written, until she and her partner du jour were drawn into a maelstrom of passion.

More than once she was Marilyn Fairchild, with her auburn hair and her hot throaty voice, meeting him in a dingy Village bar and taking him home to her apartment. In that fantasy the two of them made fitful, angry love, moving from one position to another, snarling at each other while their bodies thrust away. At the end she lay writhing on her bed, a butt plug in her ass and the largest dildo deep in her cunt, while she strummed her clit with one hand and gripped her throat hard with the other.

That scared her, the first time she did it. Because in the fantasy it was two hands, not one, and his hands, not hers, and his grip didn’t loosen with her orgasm. She was imagining herself dying at his hands, and the notion evidently thrilled her.

But it was just a fantasy. It wasn’t really anything to worry about, was it?

It wasn’t as if she lacked for sexual outlets. Nor was her growing fascination with Creighton taking the joy out of her real encounters with real people. If her initial experiments had been designed in part to empower her sexually, then she’d succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She seemed to grow more powerful every day, able to get almost anyone to do almost anything.

She remembered what she’d said to Franny, drawing a distinction between her own acts and whoring. She didn’t do what people liked. She did what they very definitely didn’t like, or at least didn’t know they liked, and made them like it.

Had Franny ever dreamed he’d like being treated like a girl, his body smooth and hairless, his flesh perfumed with scented oils? Every Friday night she took him to places he’d never been and showed him parts of himself he’d never imagined.

The other night she curled up beside him and sucked on his nipple, her cupped hands fashioning a breast from the surrounding flesh. All smooth and hairless like a girl, she’d murmured. Franny, wouldn’t it be nice if you got hormone shots? You could grow tits, Franny. I could take off your bra and suck your titties.

Franny the tranny, she thought, knowing that in fact it would never go that far. He wouldn’t go out looking for a sex-change doctor, and she didn’t think she’d really like it if he did. She liked his manly chest, his firm pectoral muscles. But her words would stay with him, and he’d grow breasts in his mind, and when she stroked his chest and sucked his nipples he’d respond as urgently as if he did have breasts.

No reason she couldn’t get him to have his nipples pierced. She’d send him to Medea — no, she’d take him to Medea. She hadn’t gone back herself, wasn’t so sure she wanted labial rings after all, but if she took Franny, and hooked him up to that St. Andrew’s cross of hers, and if she could blow him while Medea did the piercing, at least for the first one, and then if she could talk Medea into letting her do the second, urging the needle through the stiffened flesh...

Her threesome with Jay McGann and Lowell Cooke was going through interesting changes. Lowell, the loser in a who-comes-last contest (which could be as easily viewed, she thought, as a victory of her left hand over her right hand) had been a good sport, giving his promising young author what he’d previously only given him metaphorically. She’d rubbed against him while he performed the act, murmuring encouragement, adding a caress or two of her own to his.

Now, several weeks later, any inhibition they’d had about inadvertent contact was long gone, and their hands were as apt to be on each other as on her. The sandwich remained their finale, and it never ceased to thrill her, having one at her back and one at her front, being impaled fore and aft. She sensed, though, that it wouldn’t be long before she now and then yielded her central role, and took a turn as one of the pieces of bread.

Meanwhile she was still the meat in the sandwich. Or, as one of them had told her, You’re in the middle, fucking a writer and a publisher simultaneously. You know what that makes you, Susan? The agent!

The Allgood show was shaping up. She’d hired a small van and picked up the artist’s new work, four of the five pieces he’d made since her earlier visit. He kept one, managing to communicate that he was not sure it was finished, but beamed happily as the rest were carried off.

Lois Appling photographed the new pieces, although they wouldn’t be in the brochure, or in the show itself. They’d be held in reserve, for private sale to select customers after the sold-out show was down, or as a start toward her next show sometime a year or two down the line. And she sent Lois out to Brooklyn to photograph the artist. Lois normally worked in her studio, but understood that this particular artist was too nuts to come into Manhattan to have his picture taken. She brought back some good shots of the man at work, capturing not only his eccentricity but also his passion.

With all that done, she’d decided there was no need to deny herself. She got Reginald Barron to come into the city, met him for a drink at Chelsea Commons, took him on a walking tour to show him where the Carpenter had thrown his firebombs, and brought him up to her apartment and fucked the daylights out of him.

He was, as she’d anticipated, a beautiful boy, with a classical physique and a beautiful penis. His skin was like velvet, and his abiding innocence was delicious. He was not without experience — how could he be, looking the way he did? — but it was clear that she was something new to him, worldly and sophisticated, a woman his mother’s age with a girl’s hairless body.

For all of that, there was something oddly disappointing in the experience. She knew that she could enmesh him in an affair, that she could lead him across new frontiers as she led the others, but she knew that wasn’t something she wanted to do. Afterward, when he came out of the shower, she brought him a glass of iced tea and told him she certainly hadn’t planned for this to happen, but that she was just as glad that it did. It was a barrier they’d had to cross once to ensure a smooth working relationship, she told him, and he nodded thoughtfully, as if the gibberish she was spouting made perfect sense. And it had been lovely, she went on, but now there’d be no need for them to do this again. In fact, she stressed, it was important that they not do it again.

He nodded again, told her he supposed she was right. And, if he was a little disappointed, it was clear to her that he was also more than a little relieved. If he’d been just a few years older, she thought, he’d have known to keep the relief from showing.

She felt a similar admixture of disappointment and relief when he was out the door. Part of what bothered her was that she’d planned on waiting until after the November show. She’d jumped the gun by three months, and for no good reason beyond libidinous curiosity. She wasn’t lacking for lovers, nor had she been driven by a particularly urgent yen for Reginald.

It took her a while, but she figured out what it was. She had an itch, and couldn’t reach to scratch it, so she’d scratched somewhere else, where it didn’t itch.

The itch was Creighton, and she couldn’t have him. So she’d used this boy, in a way that had proved pleasurable but unsatisfying for them both, and now he was gone, and she felt worse than when she’d started.

She bathed, put on a robe, turned on the television set. The news was bad, the way it always was. She switched channels, and landed in the middle of some special on terrorism, just in time for them to show her for the thousandth time the plane striking the tower, and the burst of yellow flame shooting out the other side.

“What’s the difference?” she said aloud. “What does it matter what anybody does? We’re all going to die.”

After her unfortunate (not to say costly) conversation with Harwood Zeller, after she’d called three different people to arrange a lunch date and found them all otherwise engaged, she skipped lunch and took a class at Integral Yoga, thinking it would calm her down. As far as she could tell, it had no effect whatsoever.

So she returned to the gallery and seduced Chloe.

At least that was what she thought she was doing. But it played out a little differently than she’d planned.

She’d waited until the gallery was empty, then surreptitiously locked the door. She went over and sat on the edge of Chloe’s desk, swinging her leg, and asked the girl if she’d had any more piercings since she’d gone to Medea.

“Well, I got the other nipple done,” Chloe said. “Want to see?”

They went into the back office, and Chloe cheerfully bared her breasts, and there was a stud in each, and how large and well formed they were.

“I went to Medea myself,” she said, and Chloe said No, really? You’re kidding me, right? In response she’d unbuttoned her own blouse, unclasped her bra, and held her breasts in the palms of her hands, offering them for inspection.

“Oh, they’re beautiful, Susan!”

“Tiny, compared to yours.”

“Oh, I’m a cow. Yours are so pretty.”

Could anything really be this easy? “I have something else to show you,” she said, and quickly got out of her slacks, removing her panties in the same motion.

Chloe gaped, reached out a hand, touched. With her other hand she grabbed Susan behind the head and kissed her full on the mouth. Below, the girl’s fingers were busy.

“We can go to my apartment,” she managed to say.

“First we’re each gonna get off,” Chloe said, “and then we’ll go to your apartment.”

So it was by no means clear who had seduced whom. Chloe, it turned out, had had plenty of experience with women, and had originally shown Susan her breasts not out of sheer exhibitionism but in the hope it might lead somewhere. “But you were so cool,” Chloe said, “I just figured you were straight as a gate. So I let it alone.”

At one point, lying on top of Chloe, tasting her own sex on Chloe’s mouth, her own breasts cushioned by Chloe’s breasts, she fitted her hands lightly around the girl’s neck, lacing her fingers, putting her thumbs together.

She thought, What are you doing? Stop it!

Not the next day or the day after, she left the gallery and walked down to the Village. Like some demented stalker, she went first to Charles Street, where she stood gaping at the brownstone where Marilyn Fairchild had lived and died, and then to Bank Street, where John Blair Creighton was presumably hard at work on the book that would make him rich.

She got lost looking for the Kettle of Fish, but found it, and went in and had a glass of white wine, hoping he’d walk in. He didn’t, and it was hard to see why anybody would. A collection of drunks and losers, she thought, with most of them able to claim membership in both groups. She finished her wine, fended off the halfhearted overtures of a man with the emptiest eyes she’d ever seen, and went home.

His number was in the book. That was how she’d found his address. She dialed his number and it rang and his machine picked up. She heard the message all the way through before ringing off.

She’d done this before. It was a way to hear his voice. But she wasn’t about to leave a message. What could she say?

There had to be some way to get him to call her, some way to get past the velvet rope and into his life. That was all she needed. If she was right in what she sensed, he’d be drawn to her as fiercely as she was to him. If not, that would be almost as good; she’d get over her obsession and be free to live her life.

All she had to do was get one small foot in the door. But how?

In the morning, when the answer came to her, she couldn’t believe it had taken her so long to think of it.

She gave her name to the receptionist, and seconds later Maury Winters was on the line. “Your jury duty’s not until October,” he said, “and yes, you can get out of it. All you have to do is move to Australia.”

“They’ve got all these poisonous spiders there.”

“Spiders? I thought kangaroos.”

“Kangaroos I wouldn’t mind. Spiders I can live without.”

“What’s your source for these spiders that I never until this minute heard about?”

“The Discovery Channel.”

“If they say spiders,” he said, “there’s spiders. Don’t move to Australia. Go do your civic duty. Three days and you’re done.”

“That’s not what I called about, Maury.”

“It figures.”

“I’m interested in one of your clients.”

“I’ve got dozens of clients,” he said, “and believe me, you’re not interested in any of them. And if they were interested in you, you know what I’d tell you? Go to Australia. Spiders, schmiders, go to Australia.”

“John Creighton,” she said.

“Oh, him,” he said. “The gambler.”

“Does he have a gambling jones? I didn’t know that. Because there’s no hint of it in his books.”

“As far as I personally know,” he said, “he couldn’t tell you if a straight beats a flush. No, this is a different kind of gambling. The DA’s office offered him an easy out. Plead to involuntary manslaughter, do no time, case closed. He turned them down.”

“He wouldn’t have to go to prison? Is he crazy? Why did he turn it down?”

It made sense when he explained it. By taking the plea, he’d be stating for the record that he’d killed Marilyn Fairchild. He couldn’t take the deal and go on maintaining his innocence.

“My opinion,” he said, “it’s a good gamble. Odds are they’ll drop the charges if he doesn’t take a plea and give them an out. Everybody’d be just as happy to put this one on the Carpenter’s tab, and there’s a lot of circumstantial chazerai to support it. The connection with Pankow, the kid who cleaned all three bars and the whorehouse, and also cleaned for Fairchild and discovered her body. Cleaned the whole apartment first, incidentally, which is why they didn’t find any of the bastard’s fingerprints there. One print in that apartment and they’d drop all charges and shake his hand in public.”

“That’s what it would take?”

“To make this go away? That, or a couple good sightings of the son of a bitch in the right place at the right time. I let my detective go, he couldn’t come up with anything, but he tried. Went to the bar, the Fish Kettle, showed the picture, like they haven’t all seen the schmuck’s picture a thousand times already. There are plenty of people who think they saw him in the Village, but nobody can put him in the bar.”

“But you think they’ll drop the charges anyway.”

“I think so, and if we have to go to trial I think we’ll get a Not Guilty, but it’s still a gamble. Now I’ve got a question. Why the hell do you care?”

“I want to meet him.”

“You want to meet him. Creighton? Or the Carpenter?”

“God forbid. Creighton, of course.”

“You said you read his books.”

“All of them.”

“They any good?”

“You haven’t read them yourself?”

“I’m his attorney, not his editor. What does he need me to read his books? Are they any good?”

“They’re excellent.”

“I’m relieved to hear that. Maybe he’ll be able to pay my fee.”

“You must know about—”

“About the contract he signed, yes, of course I know about it. He’ll be a rich man, which makes it that much more of a gamble. Most prisons, they don’t let you take your computer with you. Some of ’em they don’t even give you a pencil. Why do you want to meet him?”

“Actually,” she said, “I did meet him. He was at a table at Stelli’s last month and I went over and introduced myself. I gave him my card, said I’d like for him to call me.”

“And he didn’t.”

“No.”

“And you could call him, but how would that look?”

“Exactly.”

“Susan, what? You read his books and you fell in love with him?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t know.”

“So I call him and tell him what? Here’s this girl, take her to a restaurant and you’ll get a nice surprise.”

“You can tell him that if you want.”

“I can tell him anything, just so he calls you.”

“Yes.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Susan, he swears he never killed nobody, and he’s my client, so of course he’s telling God’s own truth. But just between you and me, and the fact notwithstanding that nobody’s gonna prove this in court, it’s entirely possible he killed that woman.”

“He didn’t kill her, Maury.”

“You know this because you read his books.”

“Yes.”

“If it goes to trial,” he said, “I’ll subpoena you, and you can read these wonderful books to the jury. I’d ask you if you know what you’re doing, but the answer is you don’t, and that’s beside the point, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make the call, and I won’t ask him to call you, I’ll tell him to call you. And you’ll owe me, which would mean I’d take you out for a nice dinner, but how can I do that if you’re in love?”

“I could never be too much in love for that,” she said. “And Maury? You don’t have to take me to dinner, either.”

“All I have to do is whistle, huh? But you’re not old enough to remember that movie. I’ll call him right now. You’re at the gallery?”

“I’m home, I didn’t go in yet.”

“Stay by the phone. I’ll make sure he calls.”