20

Wendolyn felt his penis stir, like a divining rod. It lifted against his trousers, huge and insistent. He listened, expecting to hear the fabric tear and see his cock, live and pink and terrible, levitating in the half-light.

The image made him laugh. He converted the laughter to what he thought was his advantage. “I think, really,” he said offhandedly, “that I should take you home.”

“You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?” Christine Rivers sat up, balancing on the edge of the cushion as if about to spring. “I know. You’re afraid you won’t be able to get it up.” Her eyes met his, but her hand jutted forward to discover the error of her surmise. She spread her fingers over the bulge in his pants, her smile widening. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

He must have followed her. “I’m going to undress,” he said casually, “and I’d suggest you do likewise.”

But she didn’t. She propped both pillows against the headboard and leaned back, as if to read. She watched him fumble with the buttons at his wrist.

He looked down at her, noting the absence of color in the gray-lit room. Her hair, bold black against the stark pillow, her mouth gray against the lighter gray of her face. Her skirt gone black, her sweater drained white.

“Aren’t you going to undress?” he asked gently, wondering if he should kiss her, touch her, reach to unclasp the waistband of her skirt. He sat beside her to remove his shoes and socks.

“I don’t want to undress,” she said. “I’ll freeze to death.” She braced her feet against the mattress, raising her ass. “But, look …” She slid her panties off and tossed them to the floor. “We can still do this.”

He let his trousers down. When she spread her legs, he knelt between them and closed his eyes.

The walls of her vagina were slick. They exerted a plump pressure which, he was forced to admit, was superior to that of his hand. He wondered how he might duplicate that quality when alone again. Perhaps by using both hands, warming them, wetting them.

But her movement subtracted from his pleasure. He had hoped to maintain the rhythm he had practiced over long years of solitude, but could not. She rolled and bobbed and writhed, opposing him, it seemed. Like dancing with an inept partner.

Not only that. She made sounds. He recognized them as those he had seen on the pages of the books he had been examining of late. Words drawn into streams of type or elongated by hyphens. The orthography of the authors, he decided, had been accurate.

But all of this interrupted his imaginings and thus held his orgasm at bay. And, after the first half hour Ronald Wendolyn wanted very much to come.

The trick was to stop thinking. Then he would come. If she would stop moving and he would stop thinking about how much he wanted her to stop moving, he would come.

But she had stopped moving. Her vagina was constricted and dry. And she was silent now. He ground and pumped and ground and pumped and still he could not come.

It was probably her clothes, woolens that scratched at his stomach and his thighs. He ached from the rubbing and thought that blisters would raise where he had, for so long, been scraping against the fabric.

He heard himself grunt, then gasp, and gasp again. Sweat rolled into his eyes and burned. He was unable to end it, this struggle, and hated that Christine Rivers had witnessed it. Her invasion of his privacy was so total now.

He was grateful for the darkness that had swallowed the room, glad he did not have to see her face. Was she weary? Was she in pain? Worst of all, was she bored? He imagined her expression, the cynical twist of her upper lip, the deliberate glaze of her eyes. Then he heard her. She wanted him to hear.

Christine Rivers lay in Ronald Wendolyn’s newly violated bed and counted the strokes. Counted, out loud, the number of times he had poked his virgin organ inside her. She was on stroke 757, and now, in severe monotone, she told him it was 758, then 759.

“Seven hundred and six—”

Ronald Wendolyn rested all of his weight on his right forearm, drew his left hand back, and let it fly, full-force, at the spot where her voice had arisen.

Had there been any trace of lubricant, he would have been thrown from her body. But there was none. Their bond held despite the impact of the blow.

At once she became a vigorous participant again, pushing up at him with little fists and raising her hips high off the bed. And she made, all the while, a deep, gargling sound. One he hadn’t read of. He pushed her wrists back against the mattress and pumped until she stopped gargling, stopped moving. Still, he hadn’t come.

He withdrew angrily, painfully. His erection mocked him and his testicles felt like sinkers. He stood, took a cigarette from the night table, and groped for matches.

She said nothing.

He struck the match and, with a rush of courage, looked down at her. And then he came, doubling over with the thrust of it, splashing semen on his legs and his stomach and on the carpet. The cigarette fell from his mouth unlit.

He recovered and switched the bedside lamp on. He gaped at her and she gaped as well, but at some distant thing. Blood bubbled at her mouth and rolled in gooey streams from her nose, which was swollen, distorted. Her sweater was stained maroon, with little spatters here and there. Her hair was lank.

He tried to lift her, and was startled. Not by her weight—he had read enough to expect that—but by a cramp in his hand. He yanked it away reflexively, and she fell back onto the bed.

He turned the light off and stood at the window regarding the snow. What would he do?

He went downstairs and put a sheet of bond into the typewriter.

He would gather her belongings, remembering the knee socks first. They would be dry now. He would take them from the mantel, lovingly.

Then he would remove the paper from inside the shoes and toss the little wads on the embers. Then roll the socks and place them inside one of the shoes.

Now her panties. He would go upstairs, treading softly, though there was no need to do so, and bring her panties down.

It would be laborious, what with the pain in his hand twanging, twanging. But he would wad the panties and place them inside the other shoe.

And now the body. He would drag—or perhaps carry—her body to the car.

He would prop it carefully in the passenger seat. It would lean against the door.

He would drive slowly, because of the snow. The snow would swirl, filling the beams of his headlights. The wiper blades would barely clear the space on the windshield before the spot would fill again.

Where would he take her? And would he say her or it?

Ah! He would take her to that billboard on the edge of town, backing into the glare of lights that surrounded the sign.

He would open the car door and tug at her sweater. But wait! If she were leaning against the door …

He would open the door and she would fall from the car, onto her face. He would pull her, with much exertion, behind the lattice that formed the base of the sign. And now he would return to the car, fetching her shoes and her coat. God, her coat. He had almost forgotten.

He wondered, would there be blood where she had fallen? No. He would see an indentation, that was all. An indentation already filling with snow.

And the tracks his tires had made? They, too, would be hidden almost at once.

No cars would come, of course, and no pedestrians. He would be safe. So safe that he would dare to scrape the snow from the back window before driving on.

He would look, just once, in the rearview mirror. Inject some humor here. In the rearview mirror he would see the billboard. The one that showed a service-station attendant, close up, grinning at a little red can of Winn’s Friction Proofing.

He, the callow murderer, would laugh all the way home.