by Jeff Gelb
“You fucked this man to death!” the man exclaimed, proudly staring at Sally with the first sign of an expression since they’d met: a look of cheerfulness, of accomplishment. But his face suddenly went blank and he stared across the room in a psychotic daze. “There’s nothing like the look on someone’s face who dies at the point of orgasm,” he said. “It’s the ultimate turn-on.” He glared at her coldly, his eyes vacant, his chin held high. “It could have been you, you know,” he hissed. “I kill the one who’s most easily within reach, and this time the guy happened to be in the most convenient position.”
Sally pleaded with her eyes. “Y-y-you can’t do this to me! You can’t leave me here like this!”
“Oh, but I can,” he answered, her voice jerking him back to reality. The man’s lips formed a wicked smile as his eyes dropped to a bloody letter-opener on the floor. “If I had killed you, I would’ve used a screwdriver,” he said as he patted an inside pocket. “That would’ve seemed more like a man’s weapon.”
Sally didn’t know what to say. The man stopped at the door and scowled at her one last time. “Think about me while your ass rots in jail, you cheap whore,” he hissed. The man turned the doorknob with a handful of rubber glove and whisked outside.
As the door clicked shut, Sally tried to calm herself. Panic at this point would accomplish nothing. She reached for the bedside telephone and jabbed a shaking finger at the O button. When the front desk answered, she pleaded, “Please call an ambulance to Room 110. And get the police, too.”
Trying carefully not to disturb the evidence, she hung up the phone and slid from the bed, her bare feet almost stepping on the murder weapon on the floor. A stream of blood and semen ran down her stomach and tickled her inner thigh. She grabbed a towel in the bathroom to clean herself, then went to a nearby closet and found two spare flannel blanked, wrapping one around herself, then kneeling beside her immobile partner on the floor.
“Can you hear me?” she whispered.
His lips were blue; there was no response at all. She placed an ear against his nose and detected no sigh of breath.
“Help is on the way,” she told him, as if he could hear—as if it really mattered. Gently, she covered him with the other blanket to his neck and stared into the stillness of his face, at his glazed, unblinking green eyes. Although he was a stranger, he had made love to her, and, to his credit, he had been a thoughtful, considerate lover. Even amid the horror of the scene, a sense of loss prevailed.
Then the man’s last words echoed through her mind: You cheap whore. Sally took a deep breath and returned to the bed, searching for the wallet where she had dropped it on the carpet near the nightstand. If the man had been legitimate, if all had gone as planned and he had reached for his wallet to give her the money he had promised, she would have led him to believe the wallet had simply fallen from his hip pocket. She looked inside and found a driver’s license with the man’s photo staring back at her: Jeremy K. Slatts. A shiver ran through her body, and Sally slammed the wallet against the top of the nightstand to await the police. She recalled the arrogance in the man’s voice, so confident that he had committed the perfect crime.
Sally forced a smile. You won’t get very far this time, Jeremy Slatts, she thought.
Former pickpockets make lousy scapegoats.
Sex Object
Graham Masterton
She sat against the foggy afternoon light, perched straight-backed on the black Swedish chair, her ankles crossed. She wore a perfectly tailored Karl Lagerfield suit and a black straw hat and her legs were perfect, too.
Dr. Arcolio couldn’t see her face clearly because of the light behind her. But her voice was enough to tell him that she was desperate, in the way that only the vices of very, very rich men are capable of being desperate.
The wives of ordinary men would never think about such things, let alone get desperate about them.
She said, “My hairdresser told me that you were the best.”
Dr. Arcolio steepled his hands. He was bald, dark, and swarthy, and his hands were very hairy. “Your hairdresser?” he echoed.
“John Sant’Angelo…he has a friend who wanted to make the change.”
“I see.”
She was nervy, vibrant, like an expensive racehorse. “The thing was…he said that you could do it very differently from all the rest…that you could make it real. He said that you could make it feel real. With real responses, everything.”
Dr. Arcolio thought about that and then nodded. “This is absolutely true. But then I’m dealing with transplants, you understand, rather than modifications of existing tissue. It’s just like heart or kidney surgery…We have to find a donor part and then insert that donor part and hope that there’s no rejection.”
“But if you found a donor…you could do it for me?”
Dr. Arcolio stood up and paced slowly around his office. He was a very short man, not more than five-foot-five, but he had a calmness and a presence that made him both fascinating to watch and impressive to listen to. He was dressed very formally, in a three-piece chalkstripe suit, with a white carnation in the buttonhole and very highly polished oxfords.
He crossed to the window and drew back the curtains and stood for a long while staring down at Brookline Place. It hadn’t rained for nearly seven weeks now, and the sky over Boston was an odd bronze color.
“You realize that what you’re asking me to do is very questionable, both medically and morally.”
“Why?” she retorted. “It’s something I want. It’s something I need.”
“But Mrs. Ellis, the operations I perform are normally to correct a physical situation that is chronically out of tune with my patients’ emotional state. I deal with transsexuals, Mrs. Ellis, men who have penises and testes but who are psychologically women. When I remove their male genitalia and give them female genitalia instead…I am simply changing their bodies in line with their minds. In your case, however—”
“In my case, Doctor, I’m thirty-one years old, I have a husband who is wealthier than anybody in the entire state of Massachusetts, and if I don’t have this operation then I will probably lose both him and everything I’ve ever dreamed of. Don’t you think that falls into exactly the same category as your transsexuals? In fact, don’t you think my need is greater than some of your men who want to turn into women simply because they like to wear high heels and garter belts and panties by Frederick’s of Hollywood?”
Dr. Arcolio smiled. “Mrs. Elliss…I’m a surgeon. I perform operations to rescue people from deep psychological misery. I have to abide by certain strictly defined ethics.”
“Dr. Arcolio, I am suffering from deep psychological misery. My husband is showing every sign of being bored with me in bed, and since I’m his fifth wife I think the odds of him divorcing me are growing steadily by the minute, don’t you?”
“But what you’re asking—it’s so radical. It’s more than radical. And permanent, too. And have you considered that it will disfigure you, as a woman?”
Mrs. Ellis opened her black alligator pocketbook and took out a black cigarette, which she lit with a black enameled Dunhill lighter. She pecked, sucked, blew smoke. “Do you want me to be totally candid with you?” she asked.
“I think I insist on your being totally candid with me.”
“In that case, you ought to know that Bradley has a real thing for group sex…for inviting his pals to make love to me, too. Last week, after that charity ballet at Great Woods, he invited seven of them back to the house. Seven well-oiled Back Bay plutocrats! He told me to go get undressed while they had martinis in the library. Then afterward they came upstairs, all seven of them.”
Dr. Arcolio was examining his framed certificate from Brigham and Woman’s Hospital as if he had never seen it before. His heart was beating quickly; he didn’t know why. Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome? Or atrial fibrillation? Or maybe fear, with a subtle seasoning of sexual arousal? He said, as flatly as he could manage, “When I said can
did…well, you don’t have to tell me any of this. If I do decide to go ahead with such an operation, it will only be on the independent recommendations of your family doctor and your psychiatrist.”
Mrs. Ellis carried on with her narrative regardless. “They climbed on top of me and all around me, all seven of them. I felt like I was suffocating in sweaty male flesh. Bradley penetrated me from behind; George Cartin penetrated me from the front. Two of them pushed themselves into my mouth, until I felt that I was choking. Two forced their penises into my ears. The other two rubbed themselves on my breasts.
“They got themselves a rhythm going like an Ivy League rowing team. They were roaring with every stroke. Roaring. I was like nothing at all, in the middle of all this roaring and rowing. Then the two of them climaxed into my mouth, and the other two in my ears, and the next two over my breasts. Bradley was the last. But when he was finished, and pulled himself out of me, I was dripping with semen, all over me, dripping; and it was then that I knew that Bradley wanted an object—not a wife, not even a lover. An object.
Dr. Arcolio said nothing. He glanced at Mrs. Ellis, but Mrs. Ellis’s face was concealed behind a sloping eddy of cigarette smoke.
“Bradley wants a sex object, so I’ve decided that if he wants a sex object I’ll be a sex object. What difference will it make? Except that Bradley will be happy with me and life will stay the same.” She gave a laugh like a breaking champagne glass. “Rich, pampered, secure. And nobody needs to know.”
Dr. Arcolio said, “I can’t do it. It’s out of the question.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Ellis replied. “I knew you’d say that. I came prepared.”
“Prepared?” Dr. Arcolio frowned.
“Prepared with evidence of three genital transplants that you performed without the permission of the donors’ executors. Jane Kestenbaum, August 12th, 1987; Lydia Zerbey, February 9th, 1988; Catherine Stimmell, June 7th, 1988. All three had agreed to be liver, kidney, heart, eye, and lung donors. Not one of them had agreed to have their genitalia removed.
She coughed. “I have all the particulars, all of the records. You carried out the first two operations at the Brookline Clinic, under the pretense of treating testicular cancer, and the third operation at Lowell Medical Center, on the pretext of correcting a double hernia.”
“Well, well,” said Dr. Arcolio. “This must be the first time that a patient has black mailed me into carrying out an operation.”
Mrs. Ellis stood up. The light suddenly suffused her face. She was spectacularly beautiful, with high Garboesque cheekbones, a straight nose, and a mouth that looked as if it were just about to kiss somebody. Her eyes were blue as sapphires, crushed underfoot. To think that a woman who looked like this was begging him to operate on her, bullying him into operating on her, was something that Dr. Arcolio found incredible, even frightening.
“I can’t do it,” he repeated.
“Oh, no, Dr. Arcolio. You will do it. Because if you don’t, all of the details of your nefarious operations will go directly to the district attorney’s office, and then you will go directly to jail. And with you locked up, think of all those transsexual men who are going to languish in deep psychological misery, burdened with a body that is so chronically out of tune with their minds.”
“Mrs. Ellis—”
She stepped forward. She was threateningly graceful, and nearly five inches taller than he was, in her gray high heels. She smelled of cigarettes and Chanel No. 5. She was long-legged, and surprisingly large-breasted, although her suit was cut so well that her bosom didn’t seem out of proportion. Her earrings were platinum, by Guerdier.
“Doctor,” she said, and for the first time he detected the slight Nebraska drawl in her undertones, “I need this life. In order to keep this life, I need this operation. If you don’t do it for me, then so help me, I’ll ruin you, I promise.”
Dr. Arcolio looked down at his desk diary. It told him, in his own neat writing, that Mrs. Helen Ellis had an appointment at 3:45. God, how he wished that he hadn’t accepted it.
He said, quietly, “You’ll have to make three guarantees. One is that you’re available to come to my clinic on Kirkland Street in Cambridge at an hour’s notice. The second is that you tell absolutely nobody apart from your husband who undertook the surgery for you.”
“And the third?”
“The third is that you pay me a half-million dollars in negotiable bonds as soon as possible, and a further half-million when the operation is successfully completed.”
Mrs. Ellis nodded the slightest of nods.
Dr. Arcolio said, “That’s agreed, then. Christ. I don’t know who’s the crazier, you or me.”
In the dead of February, Helen Ellis was lunching at Jasper’s on Commercial Street with her friend Nancy Pettigrew when the maître d’ came over and murmured in her ear that there was a telephone call for her.
She had just been served a plateful of nine Wellfleet littlenecks with radish-chili salsa and a glass of chilled champagne.
“Oh…whoever it is, tell them I’ll call back after lunch, would you?”
“Your caller said it was very urgent, Mrs. Ellis.”
Nancy laughed. “It isn’t your secret lover, is it, Helen?”
The maître d’ said, soberly, “The gentleman said that time was of the essence.”
Helen slowly lowered her fork.
Nancy frowned at her and said, “Helen? Are you all right? You’ve gone white as a sheet.”
The maître d’ pulled out Helen’s chair for her and escorted her across the restaurant to the phone booth. Helen picked up the receiver and said, “Helen Ellis here,” in a voice as transparent as mineral water.
“I have a donor,” said Dr. Arcolio. “The tissue match is spot-on. Do you still want to go through with it?”
Helen swallowed. “Yes. I still want to go through with it.”
“In that case, come immediately to Cambridge. Have you eaten anything or drunk anything?”
“I was just about to have lunch. I ate a little bread.”
“Don’t eat or drink anymore. Come at once. The sooner you get here, the greater the chance of success.”
“All right,” Helen agreed. Then, “Who was she?”
“Who was who?”
“The donor. Who was she? How did she die?”
“It’s not important for you to know that. In fact it’s better psychologically if you don’t.”
“Very well,” said Helen. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”
She returned to her table. “Nancy, I’m sorry…I have to leave right now.”
“When we’re just about to start lunch? What’s happened?”
“I can’t tell you, I’m sorry.”
“I knew it,” said Nancy, tossing down her napkin. “It is a lover.”
“Let me explain what I’ve been able to do,” said Dr. Arcolio.
It was nearly two months later, the first week in April. Helen was sitting in the white-tiled conservatory of their Dedham-style mansion on the Charles River, on a white wickerwork daybed heaped with embroidered cushions. The conservatory was crowded with daffodils. Outside, however, it was still very cold. The sky above the glass cupola was the color of rainwashed writing ink, and there was a parallelogram of white frost on the lawns where the sun had not yet appeared around the side of the house.
“In your usual run-of-the-mill transsexual operation, the testes are removed, and also the erectile tissue of the penis. The external skin of the penis is then folded back into the body cavity in a kind of rolled-up tube, creating an artificial vagina. But of course it is artificial, and very unsatisfactory in many ways, particularly in its lack of full erotic response.
“What I can do is give my patients a real vagina. I can remove from a donor body the entire vulva, including the muscles and erectile tissue that surround it, as well as the vaginal barrel. I can then transplant them onto and into the recipient patient.
“Then, by using microsurgery techniques which I
helped to develop at MIT, all of the major nerve fibers can be ‘wired into’ the recipient patient’s central nervous system…so that the vagina and clitoris are just as capable of erotic arousal as they were within the body of the donor.”
“I’ve been too sore to feel any arousal,” said Helen, with a tight, slanted smile.
“I know. But it won’t be long. You’re making excellent progress.”
“Do you think I’m really crazy?” asked Helen.
“I don’t know. It depends what your goals are.”
“My goals are to keep this lifestyle which you see all around you.”
“Well…” said Dr. Arcolio, “I think you’ll probably succeed. From what he’s been saying, your husband can’t wait for you to be fit for lovemaking again.”
Helen said, “I’m sorry I made you betray your ethics.”
Dr. Arcolio shrugged. “It’s a little late for that. And I have to admit that I’m really quite proud of what I’ve been able to achieve.”
Helen rang the small silver bell on the table beside her. “You’ll have some champagne, then, Baron Frankenstein?”
On the second Friday in May she came into the gloomy, high-ceilinged library where Bradley was working and posed in the center of the room. It was the first time that she had ever walked into the library without knocking first. She wore a long scarlet silk robe, trimmed with scarlet lace, and scarlet stiletto shoes. Her hair was softly curled and tied up with a scarlet ribbon.
She stood there with her blue eyes just a little misted and the faintest of smiles on her lips, her left hand on her hip in a subtle parody of a hooker waiting for a curb-crawler.
“Well?” she asked. “It’s four o’clock. Way past your bedtime.”
Of course Bradley had known all along that she was standing there, and even though he was frowning intently at the land-possession documents in his hands, he wasn’t able to decipher a single word. At last he looked up, tried to speak, coughed, cleared his throat.
“Is it ready?” he managed to ask, at last.
