by Karen Moline
Let her try to fly away. Let her try to end it. She is unhavable, and will escape no matter what he does to her now.
But he will not let her go without one last savage farewell.
In a swift cruel gesture he suddenly rips off her gag, tumbles her over, pushing her down before she can open her mouth to scream, pushing into her till she is choking and the tears are streaming down her cheeks, and just as suddenly pushing her back up, sitting her on his lap, one hand replacing the gag with a slap and the other cupping her breasts, pinching them, his hands a frenzy of motion, uncontrollable.
I am driving carefully through the traffic. I don’t want to get a ticket.
He is holding her tight on his lap, impaling her, too tight, his arm across her chest, she cannot breathe, and then shoves her down so she falls, the long chain coiling beside her, with a muffled cry to the carpet, where he can take her like a dog, inhuman, the pain merciless, the sight and feel of her suffering more potent than any aphrodisiac he could ever concoct.
He won’t hurt you—but he is hurting her, unbearably, she cannot breathe, she is limp beneath him, barely clinging to consciousness, but he is not through, no, he lifts her up onto the seat, laying her on her back, pulling her arms up over her head, and running his tongue over her skin, a glistening trail lapping up her shivering terror. His first delirium stilled, he becomes less frantic, his weight propped on his elbows, biting at her nipples, pinching her, moving inside her, relentless still, the car rolling forward, slowing, turning a corner, he moves with it, she is falling down a tunnel, screaming soundlessly.
One hand strays between her legs, fingering her, the sweet meandering gesture she used to love when Nick did it, perverting the tender motion into a captor’s taunt, her fear feeding it, the last, lingering lunch of the depraved.
This can’t be Nick.
Who else can it be?
It takes him forever to come, with a hugely violent shudder, grinding into her, suffocating, and he stays sprawled on top of her, unwilling to let it end. She feels his eyes upon her, through the blindfold, raking her sprawled, humiliating, violated helplessness as if his gaze were sharpened fingernails, a trace of blood following their piercing path over her skin. She feels him still, his persistent fingers unyielding, crawling up and down her like the savage nips of ants even as he pulls away slightly to reach into a pouch he’s placed by the door, one he’s kept buried in the bottom of the vintage Vuitton trunk, down where she never thought to look, then pulls out a syringe that he fills with the contents of a glass vial. Olivia feels a sharper pinch in her hip, but she barely minds it, too terrified is she by those hideous fingers.
He won’t let go of her, that’s all she knows, devouring her skin, he is taking her as he pleases, again, his breath hot, sucking the very life out of her.
He will never let her go.
She has no idea what she is anymore when he forces her head up, she hears a strange sound, liquid, it must be, poured into a glass and brought to her lips. He rips off the gag and she tries to turn her head away, but she can’t, she’s so tired and this drink is so cool, so comforting on her swollen lips, she is parched dry, she is dying.
The drugs work quickly. When Nick sees her dizzy, long rolling waves of sleep making her droop, he moves away, calmly pulling up his sweats. Finally, comes her last thought before total oblivion overtakes her. Finally.
Nick taps on the partition. It is my signal to drive him back to his bike, and when I pull up beside it, he clambers out.
I look at him, waiting impatiently for me to hand him back his leather gear, his hair disheveled, the madness of his frenzy still alight in his eyes, and I must say something. Even now, after I’d let him do it, I could never have envisioned such craven, unremitting brutality. I’d told her I wouldn’t let him hurt her—I’d told her—she believed me—
“She’ll never forgive you,” I tell him, my voice low.
“She won’t remember, not with those drugs. They never fail.” He shrugs. The bastard. “Her mind won’t let her. She’ll blank it all out. She’ll wake up and feel fuzzy and wonder what happened and where she is, but she won’t remember.”
“You can’t know that.”
“Don’t tell me what I can’t.”
“But what if it does come back, suddenly, in bits and pieces? What if she dreams it? What if—”
“Shut up,” he says as viciously as he can without yelling. “I don’t want your goddamn opinion. Just get the fuck out of my face.”
“You didn’t have to do that to her,” I persist. “She would’ve come with you today, anyway. She said she would.”
He looks at me, a flash of guilty hatred more electric than lightning proving me right. He’ll never admit it. He did the unspeakable. It’s done with. It’s over.
He’d do it again if he could.
“Get out of here,” he says. “Take her back and get out of my face before I kill you.”
He would kill me, I see it in his eyes, if he could find a way to do it, although I am much stronger, and wary, my senses keen, and have trained myself to fight. He has helped create the monster, protector and procurer, and now he must live with it, dependent on me, bitterly resentful that I am silent witness to his irrevocable degradation.
I wonder if it is possible to hate him as much as he hates me, but only for a second, because such a question does not bear answering.
Nick is not worth dying for.
OLIVIA STIRS, her tongue swollen, her head spinning, and then awakens, thirsty. The small of her back is aching, her entire body is sore.
I hand her a glass of ice water, propping her up to drink it.
“What?” she says, thickly.
“You got dizzy in the car,” I say, my heart wrenching.
The car. Her heart starts to pound, her head reeling, she can’t seem to clear it, trying to remember being in the car, how she got here, in this bed, cozy under the covers in the flat, she realizes, but it is too exhausting to think. It is not unpleasant, this lethargy, her limbs are tingling slightly as if they’d been asleep, she feels too lazy to care. Somewhere in the back of her mind is a pleading little voice, trying to warn her, trying to make her remember that something awful has happened, but the images are too far away, dark and fuzzy, she couldn’t see, that was it, a blackness in front of her, the blindfold. The blindfold in the car, and then . . . It was in a box on the seat. She put it on, or did she? She can’t remember.
“Did I . . . ? What happened?” she says, noticing that she’s dressed in the clothes she was wearing when she’d arrived here yesterday afternoon. “Where’s Nick? Why am I so tired?” Her eyes close, involuntarily.
“Hush,” I say. “Sleep.”
WHEN SHE next awakens I knock on the door and come in, already dressed in my biker gear, and hand her a helmet.
“I guess this means we’re going on the bike,” she says.
“Yes.” It is better this way, I convinced Nick, don’t put her in the backseat of that car, not now, not so soon, she needs the air on her face.
There is already traffic this early on a Monday morning, and I maneuver carefully but fast, it is cold, but I could drive forever with her arms around my waist.
“Better?” I ask, pushing up my visor and turning back to her at a stoplight.
She nods. Her head is still fuzzy, she can’t remember, and she is not yet ready to ask me the truth.
No one could be ready for that answer.
When we arrive at her door I back the bike around and turn off the engine. She takes off her helmet and hands it to me, and I rummage in the back carrier for a small package.
“What is it?” she says, feeling it carefully.
I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to explain. I’d told Nick not to give this to her, to forget it, surely if she saw it she’d remember sitting in the back seat of the Daimler,
and it falling off the seat when he opened the door. He would not listen, insistent and crazily certain that she must have it, that she’d want it because he gave it to her, just as she’d given him the sketch of the flat, an unforgettable souvenir.
She unwraps the mauve tissue. It is the jeweled panther, the handbag forgotten in the car. She unclasps it, looks inside, curious, the makeup is still there, and the strangely pungent perfume, the ruby lipstick matching the cross still dangling between her breasts.
Her hands are trembling.
Don’t, I am imploring her, a silent pleading, don’t remember this, remember instead how you were sated and delirious from an endless surfeit of pleasure in a calm dark room, an intoxication more compelling than all the snatched hours of lunch, across the park, in the other room.
“M,” she says, her voice quivering, “why did I leave this in the car?”
I shake my head.
All I’ve ever seemed to do in her presence is nod yes, or shake my head no, hiding the truth of my complicity because that is my recompense for sitting, hunched forward, hours flying by, the rectangular plastic boxes neatly labeled in growing stacks in an airless room, watching.
She comes closer to me, pushing up my visor as she’d done only two days before, another lifetime ago, when those queer eyes had still been clouded with a haze of passion. Now they are tinged with drugs, somber pewter, and troubled, trying to read my own.
Eventually, she sighs, and I breathe again. “M, the inscrutable,” she says. “I always wanted to paint you, you know, I know exactly how I’d do it, too, but I was afraid to ask. I know you won’t believe it, but your face is much more interesting than Nick’s.” She tries to smile. “Don’t tell him I said that.”
I murmur a silent prayer of thanks that she is hastily changing the subject.
“How?” I ask.
“How what?”
“How painted.”
She smiles this time, for real. “I’ll never tell.” She reaches up to touch my scars, as she has done before, and this time I try not to flinch.
“Thank you, M,” she says, “for everything.”
For everything.
“I won’t ever see you again, will I?”
“No.”
“But if I do, will you let me paint you?”
I close my eyes for only a second, conjuring up the unbelievable wonder of sitting for her, alone, in the whiteness of her studio, piano music soft in my ears, watching her brushes dance past the fierce concentration in her eyes, watching her watching me, wanting me there, wanting me.
Yes, I want to scream, yes.
“Maybe,” I say, wanting to leave her light-hearted. “I’ll never tell.”
I push up the kickstand and ride away.
The wind freezes the tears on my cheeks.
Chapter 21
Nick is sleeping in the flat, leaving only when Jamie insists on short stints on the set, and then finally refusing to budge at all, a harsh unnerving weirdness in his eyes, lying in wait, silent and still, only the slight movement of his hand bringing the cigarette to his mouth showing he’s awake.
He is listening to the sounds all around him, his hearing suddenly acute, his other senses deprived as he lies there in the dark with no distractions but this despairing desire to inhale the essence of Olivia. Cars in the street he hears, a mother screaming to her brat, kids laughing on their way home from school, the steady rumble of a taxi’s engine, a motorcycle, sirens in the distance, a wail like the foghorn off Mendocino, the small groaning creaks of the building, settling, the hiss of the radiator, the refrigerator, humming on and off, the soft chinks of the icemaker, the noise of the wind, muffled sounds he’s never heard before.
He thinks he hears a noise upstairs, sitting up in a rush, hardly daring to breathe, but that can’t be, there is only silence.
He’s never heard anything in this flat but the sound of his lust.
He tells himself over and over that she’ll give in, that she will never remember what he did to her in the car, it was no worse, he mutters in a rare paroxysm of self-reproach, than anything he ever did to her here. She will arrive, breathless, with a suitcase and a sketchpad, and fly off with him into the California sunset of his delusions.
I stand watch. Rather, I sit in my little room, bored and weary. He wants me there, nearby but not with him. Only late at night am I allowed to hurry down to buy food from the Arab grocers that Nick leaves uneaten. Last week when he’d been working for an hour’s stretch I snuck off the set to buy more books. They are a comfort. I am reading Stendhal, Chekhov, and Diderot, long, strange stories with twisting polysyllabic names and the kind of moral retribution which is anathema to anyone I’ve ever met in Hollywood. I memorize poetry, I like Rilke, especially, and Yeats. I work out, shadow-boxing, then on the door, two hundred push-ups, three hundred sit-ups. Stop and check after each fifty reps, but nothing has changed, only Nick lying on the bed, in the dark, smoking.
IT IS early evening and Nick is dozing, sprawled nude on the comforter, when he hears the unmistakable clink of a key in the lock, and he springs instantly awake, afraid he is only dreaming.
Olivia turns on the light and jumps back, startled. Her keys fall to the carpet, soundless. I hear the click of the tape starting and sit up to watch, instantly worried.
“Oh, you scared me. What are you doing here?” she says finally, catching her breath, one hand on her chest. “I didn’t think you’d—that now—at night—”
“I could ask you the same thing,” Nick says, trying to keep his voice even. “I’ve been waiting for you. I knew you would come.”
“I was at the baths,” she stammers. Her hair is wet, damp curls sticking to her neck. “And I thought to leave the keys. And find my silver earrings. I know I left them here. And—”
She doesn’t have to say it. They were a gift from Olivier, weren’t they, and she must find them.
“Is that all?” Nick says.
“Yes,” she says, her voice starting to tremble. She is trying to avoid his gaze, but she can’t help it, she can’t not look at him.
“You weren’t even going to say goodbye?”
His sarcasm frightens her. His eyes frighten her. She doesn’t know what to do.
“You’d let me leave without saying goodbye?” he asks, insistent.
“I didn’t know what to say. I was going to call, or leave you a note.”
“You didn’t know what to say. You were going to call, or leave me a note.” Mocking her. She has never seen him like this before, and she is beginning to panic, fear shooting down into her feet, rooting her legs to the floor when she most wants to flee.
“Are you coming with me?” He is standing in front of her, his glorious body naked, his eyes so darkly angry they are no longer blue, they are black pools of dread, immeasurable. He sees the answer in her eyes, a solitary tear trickling down her cheek, and he traces its path as he’d done once before, ages ago, and she shivers violently.
Not like this, please, not like this.
He is boring into her, leaning his warm body as close to hers as if he wants to smother her, dissolving her flesh so there is nothing left of her but the shadowy impression of her body etched into the hard wood of the door. What am I going to do? she thinks wildly, but her thoughts are jumbling one atop the other in her trepidation, she cannot think, she cannot breathe, he smells of cigarettes and scotch, with a faint whiff of leather, an animal smell of lust and anger, she has smelled him like that once before, where, where was it, she knows he wants her to feel the full relentless hardness of his body solid against hers, and its suffocating strength.
M, where is M, he must be here, he said he would protect her, he said it but he didn’t, where was he, where is he—
He won’t hurt you. I won’t let him.
I am standing, sickened, choked by my own
cowardly duplicity. I don’t know what to do. If I come now will she know I was there, will she, will he—
His arms around her, ribbons of steel, and he scoops her up and throws her facedown on the edge of the bed, his weight on her legs so she cannot kick out at him, his arms snatching off her jacket and her sweater, she is trying to scream but he is crushing her lungs, he’s done this before, she realizes, gulping air as he turns her slightly on her side to yank off her jeans, he’s—
The car.
She didn’t think any terror could be worse than that moment of absolute blind panic in the car, but this is, Nick on top of her, shifting his weight slightly as he stretches over, groping for one of the whips stashed under the bed. Even now in this speeded-up frantic moment he knows what he wants, the slim sleek whip with the lovely glass handle, the same colors as her hair melded stunningly into something he can hold and weld and use to hurt, hurt her now, make her suffer, and make her scream.
For a second he loosens his grip on her as his hand relaxes around the handle, and Olivia tries to crawl away to the door, naked as she is. Nick turns swiftly to reach for her, enraged, but he loses his balance and slams against one of the golden bedposts, smashing the glass into fireworks of fiery sparkles, leaving nothing but a jagged edge near his fingertips, cutting them instantly, blood coursing down his wrist in thin rivers.
He feels no pain, he sees no blood, all he sees is Olivia escaping, and he flings himself at her ankles, imprisoning them, hauling her back underneath him, forcing her over with his weight and his left arm, the whip still clenched in his right, and savagely spreads her legs. The ragged sharp glass slices the tender skin of her inner thigh with a severe stinging pain, and the wound bleeds instantly, copiously, their blood mingling together on the sheets.
“Serves you right, you bitch,” Nick says savagely as he hammers into her like an animal, but she doesn’t even feel it, her body is deadened, even the nasty cut on her thigh has stopped hurting, there is nothing worse that she can feel past the voice screaming that she doesn’t recognize as her own, a scream so hysterical, so penetrating in its fearfulness, that Nick’s frenzy stops. He moves to place his hand over the screaming, to stop its horrid noise, when he hears the only words that could penetrate the mad cloud of his rage.
