Gerald's Game(2)
Are you sure you want to do that? the new voice asked. Are youreally sure you want to have any sex with this man?
Jessie closed her eyes, as if she could make the voice shut up by doing that. When she opened them again, Gerald was standing at the foot of the bed, the front of his shorts jutting like the prow of a ship. Well... some kid's toy boat, maybe. His grin had widened further, exposing the last few teeth-the ones with the gold fillings-on both sides. She didn't just dislike that dumb grin, she realized; she despised it.
"I will let you up... if you're very, very good. Can you be very, very good, Jessie?"
Corny, the new no-bullshit voice commented. Tres corny.
He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underpants like some absurd gunslinger. The jockeys went down pretty fast once they got past his not-inconsiderable love handles. And there it was, exposed. Not the formidable engine of love she had first encountered as a teenager in the pages of Fanny Hill but something meek and pink and circumcised; five inches of completely unremarkable erection. Two or three years ago, on one of her infrequent trips to Boston, she had seen a movie called The Belly of an Architect. She thought, Right. And now I'm looking at The Penis of anAttorney. She had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep from laughing. Laughing at this point would be impolitic.
An idea came to her then, and it killed any urge she'd had to laugh. It was this: he didn't know she was serious because for him, Jessie Mahout Burlingame, wife of Gerald, sister of Maddy and Will, daughter of Tom and Sally, mother of no one, was really not here at all. She had ceased to be here when the keys made their small, steely clicks in the locks of the handcuffs. The men's adventure magazines of Gerald's teenage years had been replaced by a pile of skin magazines in the bottom drawer of his desk, magazines in which women wearing pearls and nothing else knelt on bearskin rugs while men with sexual equipment that made Gerald's look strictly HO-scale by comparison took them from behind. In the backs of these magazines, between the talk-dirty-to-me phone ads with their 900 numbers, were ads for inflatable women which were supposed to be anatomically correct-a bizarre concept if Jessie had ever encountered one. She thought of those air-filled dollies now, their pink skins, lineless cartoon bodies, and featureless faces, with a kind of revelatory amazement. It wasn't horror-not quite-but an intense light flashed on inside her, and the landscape it disclosed was certainly more frightening than this stupid game, or the fact that this time they were playing it in the summer house by the lake long after summer had run away for another year.
But none of it had affected her hearing in the slightest. Now it was a chainsaw she heard, snarling away in the woods at some considerable distance-as much as five miles, maybe. Closer by, out on the main body of Kashwakamak Lake, a loon tardy in starting its annual run south lifted its crazed cry into the blue October air. Closer still, somewhere here on the north shore, a dog barked. It was an ugly, ratcheting sound, but Jessie found it oddly comforting. It meant that someone else was up here, midweek in October or no. Otherwise there was just the sound of the door, loose as an old tooth in a rotted gum, slapping at the swollen jamb. She felt that if she had to listen to that for long, it would drive her crazy.
Gerald, now naked save for his spectacles, knelt on the bed and began crawling up toward her. His eyes were still gleaming.
She had an idea it was that gleam which had kept her playing the game long after her initial curiosity had been satisfied. It had been years since she'd seen that much heat in Gerald's gaze when he looked at her. She wasn't bad-looking-she'd managed to keep the weight off, and still had most of her figure-but Gerald's interest in her had waned just the same. She had an idea that the booze was partly to blame for that-he drank a hell of a lot more now than when they'd first been married-but she knew the booze wasn't all of it. What was the old saw about familiarity breeding contempt? That wasn't supposed to hold true for men and women in love, at least according to the Romantic poets she'd read in English Lit 101, but in the years since college she had discovered there were certain facts of life about which John Keats and Percy Shelley had never written. But of course, they had both died a lot younger than she and Gerald were now.
And all of that didn't matter much right here and right now. What maybe did was that she had gone on with the game longer than she had really wanted to because she had liked that hot little gleam in Gerald's eyes. It made her feel young and pretty and desirable. But...
... but if you really thought it was you he was seeing when he gotthat look in his eye, you were misled, toots. Or maybe you misled yourself.And maybe now you have to decide-really, really decide-if you intendto continue putting up with this humiliation. Because isn't that prettymuch how you feel? Humiliated?
She sighed. Yes. It pretty much was.
"Gerald, I do mean it." She spoke louder now, and for the first time the gleam in his eyes flickered a little. Good. He could hear her after all, it seemed. So maybe things were still okay. Not great, it had been a long time since things had been what you could call great, but okay. Then the gleam reappeared, and a moment later the idiot grin followed.
"I'll teach you, me proud beauty," he said. He actually said that, pronouncing beauty the way the landlord in a bad Victorian melodrama might say it.
Let him do it, then. Just let him do it and it will be done.
This was a voice she was much more familiar with, and she intended to follow its advice. She didn't know if Gloria Steinem would approve and didn't care; the advice had the attractiveness of the completely practical. Let him do it and it would be done. QED.