“Put your arms up over your head,” I said to Narciss Gully.
We were both naked and lying on my mother’s bed. She hesitated but then complied. I bound her wrists together with my left hand and proceeded to take her nipple in my mouth.
Her breasts were small, but the nipples were quite large. Though darker, they had the same multicoloring as the rest of her skin. The nipples were very hard against my tongue. I worked my hand down between her legs and flicked my finger against the moist flesh under the mound of hair.
“Oh God!” she hissed. “Oh no.”
I continued to tease and nibble until her hissing turned into a shout.
“Oh God, oh no. Stop! Please. Too much.”
“You want me to stop?” I asked while still licking her nipple.
“Please.”
“First I’ll count to five,” I said.
“Oh.”
“One . . .”
Narciss raised her head between her extended arms to look down at what my hand was doing.
“. . . two . . .”
She grinned and then grimaced . . .
“. . . three . . .”
. . . and then slammed her head back on the mattress.
“. . . four . . .”
“I love you,” she whispered.
“What?”
“Please. I can’t take it.”
“Five.”
I released her and moved my teasing hand away. I stood above her and she turned over on her stomach, inviting me to lie down on her back.
“Do you hear something, Charles?”
I had just awakened in the dark room. Narciss was standing at the window, cupping her ear toward the pane.
I got up and went to her. It pleased me that she was still naked. I put my arm around her slender waist and she draped her arm on my shoulder.
“Listen,” she said.
In the silence of night, you could barely make it out. No more than a murmur, it was only audible due to the proximity of my mother’s window.
“It’s that man again,” I said.
“What man?”
“The man who lives out in these woods some summers. It’s a hobo or something. Now and then someone calls the police, but they never find him. He’s crazy, and sometimes when he drinks too much wine, he gets pretty loud. He keeps his distance though. You have to listen closely just to hear it at all.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No, never.”
“Then how do you know all of that?”
“I’ve found his camps and empty bottles of cheap wine. Some people have seen him too, but not me.” My lies were becoming too large. I knew I should let it go, but I couldn’t. “We called him the Padre when I was younger, because some folks said that he was preaching to the trees. He seems harmless enough.”
I kissed Narciss and she forgot about Anniston Bennet’s shouts and my lies.
Narciss needed to talk. She was very nervous about surrendering so completely to a man she hardly knew and told me so.
“The last time I fell for a man so fast, it was all wrong,” she said as I was rubbing body oil into her shoulders. “It felt wonderful, but he wasn’t the man for me.”
“But he was right for a moment,” I argued.
“He was awful. He would take things from my house.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. A pearl ring, twenty dollars that I kept in a cookie jar, even large things like a toaster that I kept under the sink. At first I thought I was going crazy. But then one day I set a paper clip on the back of my jewelry box. He must have lifted the lid without noticing the pin. I knew immediately that he’d taken my zircon earrings. He did it three more times after that, and I broke up with him.”
She pulled away from my massage and lay on her back. I reclined, resting my head on her small stomach.
“Why did you wait?” I asked. “Why didn’t you get rid of him after the first time?”
She sat up, pushing my head down into her lap. I kissed her stomach. I remember because she had a ticklish reaction and then grabbed my hair to make me stop.
“It was weird,” she said. “Like The Twilight Zone. I knew he was doing it, but he didn’t know that I knew. I’d leave money in my purse or an earring on the night table and then he’d come in and do that love thing he did.”
“It was that good?” I asked.
“He was a wonderful lover,” she said. “But that wasn’t why I kept him on for so long. It was like he was my shy prostitute, you know? He didn’t want to feel like a whore, so I would let him steal from me and pretend that I didn’t miss it.”
I kissed her stomach again. This time she didn’t grab my hair.
“So then why did you finally decide to break it off?”
“Because I started to change,” she said.
“Change how?”
“I don’t know if I should talk about it. I mean I don’t even know you.” Narciss stroked my head then, but I refrained from any more kisses.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I understand. We all have our secrets.”
Really I didn’t care about Narciss’s secret sex life with her gigolo. I was thinking about the man in my basement, about what the consequences might be after he got out of his cell.
“It’s not any kind of big secret or anything,” she said. “It was just that I was acting like some other person and I didn’t like who that person was.”
“And who was that?” I asked, sitting up.
“I was aggressive. I made him do things and I asked him questions while we were . . . were doing it. I started calling him names and doing things that I never did before.”
“What kind of things?”
She had finally caught my interest.
“I have to go to the bathroom.” She stood up and walked out of my mother’s door.
I went to the window and cupped my ear to the pane. It could have been a moose, maybe five miles distant. That’s what I could have said.
I was tired and almost scared of what I had done to Anniston Bennet. I wondered if he had a strong heart—if the stressful time in my basement might kill him. I wanted to run down while Narciss was in the toilet and make sure that the prisoner wasn’t dying. But then I thought that Bennet’s death would make everything easier. No one knew where he was, he said. I could just put him in the ground in my family’s plot. If no one was looking for him, he’d never be found. For a brief moment I considered leaving him down there until he died of starvation. If he died he couldn’t get back at me.
When I realized that I was contemplating murder, I backed away from the window.
“Did you see him?” Narciss said from behind.
“No. No.”
“Then why’d you jump away from the window like that?”
“I just remembered something. I have to go into the city tomorrow for a meeting. I thought it was the day after, but I just realized that I got confused.”
“Oh.” There was disappointment in Narciss’s voice. “How will I get back to my car?”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride to your car when we get up.”
“Oh.” She hesitated. “I thought you were trying to get rid of me now.”
“Why would you think that? You think I’d kick you out of my house in the middle of the night?”
“You’ve been so restless,” she said. “I thought you wanted to be alone.”
It was then that I realized what had happened to me. Really, what had happened to the world around me. Before Anniston Bennet had come into my life, I was invisible, moving silently among the people of the Harbor. No one wondered about me; no one questioned me. Even my best friends simply accepted what they saw. The cardplayer with a sharp tongue who couldn’t back up half the things he said. The petty thief, the man across the street, dead Samuel’s son. I might as well have been a tree at the end of the block. People saw me well enough to walk around, but that was just about it.
And for my part I treated everything and everyone around me in the same way. I could put a name on them, maybe. But I rarely touched or spoke a meaningful word to a soul. Weeks could go by and not one worthwhile piece of information would pass between me and another human being. The only chance I had at intimacy was with Clarance and Cat, but 90 percent of my time with them was spent under the influence of alcohol.
But now everything was different—half different, really. Still nobody saw me. The people at Curry’s bar in East Hampton, people on the street in the Harbor. Bethany and Narciss saw something that was like me—an image of what I thought I wanted to be—but they had no idea what was on my mind.
What had changed was what I saw. It was as if everybody had become like a mirror, and I saw reflections of what they saw instead of what it was they were trying to show me or tell me. Narciss had become a mirror and an echo chamber, giving me back every word uttered and gesture made. And when I saw or heard something I didn’t like, I had the chance to alter my behavior.
“No, baby,” I said. “Not at all. I want to see you. I want you here. It’s just that there’s been so much on my mind, and I feel so comfortable with you that I kind of sink into it, if you know what I mean.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
But her nipples were tightening again, and I was feeling the beginnings of another erection.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said. I could have been an actor in an old black-and-white movie. An airplane ace or international journalist, world-weary and in need of quiet love.
She was in the movie too, and happy with her role. Arm in arm we walked back to the bed, moving together like choreographed dancers. Every kiss hit its mark and every breath was on cue.