“It seemed that was what was going on.”
“Do you have any reason to believe that his sexual relations with the women he brought to the house were in any way unusual?” Palma asked. She wondered how a question like that might strike an older woman who had been unmarried all her life.
“Unusual,” Alice said. “Now that is a loaded question. It seems to me that that word gets harder and harder to define every year.” She looked at her hands again and shook her head. “What goes for ‘unusual’ in this neighborhood has changed…so much. Everywhere, too, it seems to me.” She shook her head. “I am afraid that more things look ‘unusual’ to me than they might to the next person. But, no. I don’t have any reason to believe that anything ‘unusual’ went on with Dr. Broussard’s women.” She looked up at Palma. “But you understand, I really don’t know.”
57
“So you know a lot about women, then?” Mary Lowe said. She was still resting her chin on her bare knees, her arms wrapped around her legs.
“I know a good deal about some types of women.”
“Some types.”
Broussard nodded. He was aware of the warm breeze coming in the window. It penetrated the hair on his chest, got next to his skin. He was aware of the wet hissing of the sprinkler system.
“Victims of father-daughter incest,” Mary said.
Broussard nodded.
“About me.”
“To a certain degree.” And then he thought to himself that possibly, of all the women he had ever had as clients, he knew the least and was destined to continue to know the least about Mary Lowe. She was sui generis, and this sense that he had of her distinctiveness did not follow from reasoned deductions, or from analysis. Rather it came from his emotional center. It was a gut feeling.
“What do you know about me?” Mary asked.
“In general?”
“No. Me specifically. As a subcategory of the ‘type’ you just mentioned.”
Broussard caught the scent of damp, sun-heated grass, and it seemed to him as erotic as Mary’s perfumed flesh. Suddenly he thought of himself standing on the other side of the room looking at himself and Mary Lowe. It was an intriguing picture, and he liked the way they looked. Himself in summer linen. Her, naked. Blond and naked, framed in the tall opened window like a Renaissance woman with a landscape stretching out past her in the early summer heat. If he had seen this picture in a book or magazine without any caption or explanation, he would have enjoyed the opportunity to create a scenario of explication.
“You tend to isolate yourself,” Broussard said, moving his attention from the outward swell of her hip to her eyes. “I would say you have no close adult women friends. You tend to rebuff the approaches of friendship from the mothers of your children’s schoolmates. You are a good mother and wife, and you are extremely conscientious in your responsibilities in these roles, though you are perhaps not as affectionate as you might be. To others, you appear to be the model parent and wife.”
Broussard uncrossed his legs and pulled his chair closer to her. She had moved her face slightly so that her mouth was hidden on the back side of her bent knees and she gazed at him over the tops of them as though she were spying on him. Having pulled his chair as close to her as the window seat would allow, he leaned forward only slightly until his lips touched—just touched—the front of her knees and their eyes were only inches apart. When he spoke, his lips feathered against her flesh.
“You are a daydreamer,” he said huskily. “You are a compulsive masturbator. You are a chronic liar. You have a long history of self-loathing which you often deal with by projecting hostility. You vacillate between repressing your sexual feelings and indulging them promiscuously. You distrust your own desires and needs, and often tell yourself you are not entitled to the care and respect your husband gives you. You have nightmares, often of a sexual nature, sometimes violent.” He paused. “I would guess, too, that your sexual experiences with women have often been violent…and in those instances…you have preferred a masochistic role.”
She did not respond when he finished, but remained motionless, looking at him across the tops of her knees. He waited. And then, as though it were a slender crimson serpent, a tiny rivulet of blood wriggled slowly down the side of her knee and made a bright scarlet path across her white thigh. It continued its wavering course until it reached the crease created by her upper thigh and groin, where it ran into the groove and then out again, proceeding down the round ambit of her hip to the window seat.
In the inside corner of each of her eyes a single oily tear clung to its source. Broussard stood and walked into the bathroom and returned with a damp washcloth. Mary had turned her head aside, back toward the mist on the lawn, and said nothing while he cleaned the blood off the window seat and then from her hip, pressed the cloth into the crease of her groin, wiped it the long length of her thigh, up to the wound, the ringlet of teeth marks. Mary allowed him to clean her as if she were an animal, a pet that he was grooming, washing. Broussard was a long time at his task. He didn’t want a trace of blood to remain. He wiped and wiped, folding the cloth to a clean spot until she was immaculate. He chose not to cover the bite mark with a bandage, but left it visible, like a rosette, a mandala, the yoni symbol, the vertical smile. Mary was oblivious of his ministrations.
When he was through he returned to the bathroom, where he rinsed out the washcloth and draped it over the side of the sink. Then he came back to the bedroom and his chair beside the window seat. Mary had sat back against the deep sill of the window seat, away from the wound on her leg. She was breathing heavily, and Broussard wondered if it was because of the pain of the wound or because of the sexual excitement that she must have derived from it.
“I guess you were right about some of that,” she said selfconsciously. She lowered her legs, stretched them out in front of her, and crossed them at her ankles. “Most of it.” Her breasts were looking at him, both pink aureoles, the buttery triangle of ringlets covering her vulva reached toward her lower stomach from between her legs.
“What do you think about it?” she asked.
“What do you think about it?”
Mary was breathing deeply, laboriously, seeming to have difficulty in getting enough air. Broussard could not imagine what must be going through her thoughts.
“I…think…I should…never have discovered…sex…that way…and…and that…I…should never, never have experienced that pleasure…with him.” She smothered a sob, and her face contorted for only an instant and then she was in control again, her stomach sucked in, her eyes widening to defy the tears.
Broussard regarded her calmly, unaffected by her pain, unmoved by the apparent disorder of her emotions. There was no way this woman could be made unattractive, not in her grief or her shame or, even, in her humiliation.
“You should understand,” he said, his own voice a little hoarse, though he didn’t know why, “that you cannot be expected to be responsible for your biological responses. If someone touches you in a certain way, if someone stimulates you sexually, your body will respond regardless of who is stimulating you. The responsibility for what you were feeling lies with your father, not with you. He betrayed a trust as old as the human family. He is responsible for your response being inappropriate because the source of the stimulus was inappropriate. A child cannot be expected to know what is unfitting…cannot be expected to understand…”
Broussard stopped. What could not be expected of a child? He had built a career on telling clients what could not be expected of a child, but, really, he didn’t know, did he? That was how he had come to be a psychiatrist, searching for such answers. Eventually he had come to the end of his quest, and they had given him his third academic degree. Yet he was still in ignorance, but too ashamed to admit it. So he began to hide behind the shield of wisdom, and he began explaining things that he himself did not understand. But people believed him, especially the women who were always so eager to believe, and he lost respect
for them because they were so easily gulled and because they had the emotional instincts of lemmings.
A child is even more innocent than adults believe. But he is more cunning, too. Adults deceive him, but he is not deceived. What did a child know? More than logic told him, more than science, more than biology. He remembered this: her large breasts…large breasts like…some of the other women…like Bernadine’s…like Mary Lowe’s…his face smothered into them, his nose buried in her cleavage, the softest thing to touch in the world. He remembered the smell of them, the feel of them against the back of his neck as she leaned over him, dressing him from behind, pulling on the panties, pulling them tight, the elastic tight around his little legs, the silk and nylon pressing his little penis against his stomach. She clucked and cooed over him, the pastel dresses, and starched pinafores. That was what made her happy, and he would do whatever made her happy. Whenever his father was away traveling, whenever they were alone, even for three or four hours, any chance she got, she took off his clothes and dressed him in girls’ clothes. And as time passed he changed and the clothes changed, but she never changed, until he was fifteen. And he liked it, too. He liked the way the nylon felt, and the silk, because it felt like her nylon, her silk, which were forbidden to him because they clung to her so intimately. Even as she held him close, his face in the crevice of her large and fragrant bosom, they were forbidden. But he could be near them, and he could imagine what lay in that dark triangle that he could see through her sheer panties. She had no inhibitions about what she herself wore as she dressed him in girls’ clothes. Two girls in their underwear. And when she had dressed him, then she would embrace him, and while she embraced him his hands were free to feel her, all of her private parts, and she let him do it then, but not when he was not dressed as a girl. She would let him—she must have encouraged him—to probe her and lick her. But didn’t he want to do it? Wasn’t he the one who, time after time, became more adventurous, more adventurous until they…regularly…went beyond those misty borders of son and mother. But she had dressed him. She had given him the opportunity. She had pulled his face into her breasts and held it there, offering her hardened nipples to his adolescent mouth. She had been the one who first had held him in such a way that he could not avoid that dusky space between her legs.
Mary Lowe was staring at him.
He heard the sprinkler system shift, another station kicking into operation on another section of the lawn, somewhere, he guessed, nearer the bayou.
“Clinical evidence suggests,” he said automatically, sounding like a textbook, “that some women respond to the trauma of incest by rejecting heterosexuality in early adulthood, or even later in life. They become bisexual, or exclusively lesbian.”
Had he already said that? Was he repeating himself?
Mary was staring at him.
“Sometimes when the incest involves ambivalent emotions—when positive feelings of pleasure, of being loved—coexist with the negative ones of offended conscience, the trauma often is greater than when the experience is totally unwanted.” He didn’t believe he had said that before. He was spitting out formulas of clinical psychology like an automaton, falling back on rote knowledge to avoid his own emotional turmoil. “When the emotions are confused, conflicted, the damage is greatest because there is no clear moral demarcation. The child feels personally responsible for committing an act that ‘seems’ wrong to her—even the offending adult telegraphs that something is amiss in what they are doing by his conniving manner—but which she nevertheless enjoys. The child never forgives herself. And when she becomes a woman she never forgives herself, though she may have relegated the experience to her unconscious so that she no longer remembers. She still is haunted by a lingering, ill-defined uneasiness that reminds her…reminds her of something horrible she has done. At some point…the experience will surface, usually at a time of stress, and she has to confront the incest.”
Broussard saw with relief that Mary took her eyes off him and began studying the bite mark above her knee. He was aware of perspiration on his top lip, of the gummy moisture that had suddenly dampened the hair under his arm. Had Mary seen something in his manner that made her divert her eyes? What happened? Why had she begun studying her bite mark? Surely…surely he could not have been so transparent as to…have overstepped…He had practiced a lifetime of restraint. He had trained himself…
Without preamble Mary began talking. “I really don’t hold any…feelings of malice toward my father,” she said. “People can’t live without some kind of love, some kind of affection. If he sought it from a child…I just find it…impossible to condemn him.” She flicked her eyes at Broussard and then returned them to her wounded leg. “I think I told you he was never anything but kind to me. Always he was tender.
Even after I was older and we had intercourse, he was kind and tender and loving.”
Broussard watched her. She was lying. Only the last time they had talked she had told him of her father’s—was it her father after all, and not her stepfather?—coarse penetration of her. She had said, “After lying still and panting a little bit, he would get off me, pull up his pants, and walk away without a word and without looking at me, like always.” Like always.
“Maybe it wasn’t the kind of love I was supposed to have,” Mary continued, “but it was all the love I was getting. And I guess it was all the love he was getting, too. I don’t believe it’s possible for human beings to live without love, and if they don’t get it, then they get something else and lie to themselves about it.”
She moved her eyes from the bite mark and let them rest on Broussard. Suddenly he wanted to kiss her eyes. He wanted to put his tongue on them, on the lenses themselves, as he had often wanted to do with Bernadine.
“When I think of this I always remember the little monkey I saw in a film in a psychology class in college,” Mary said. “For some reason, which I’ve forgotten, this baby monkey was being raised in isolation. Some kind of experiment. The lab technicians put this crude rubber tube into the cage with the baby monkey and on it they had painted these stupid round circles for eyes, and they tied a rag around the rubber tube to give it some softness. This pitiful little creature fell in love with this hard rubber tube. It became passionately attached to it, holding it, cuddling it, stroking it, grooming it. He convinced himself that the tube loved him, even though the tube, of course, never demonstrated that it loved him in any way at all. It was just there. But he convinced himself that the tube loved him, and he loved the tube. He was terrified of being separated from it, never let go of it. Then one day they separated him from it…they took it away from him. He was distraught, grief-stricken. He stopped eating. Wouldn’t sleep. Eventually, he actually got sick and died.”
Mary looked at him again. “Some kind of love. If you don’t have the genuine thing then you’ll create something to take its place. You’ll lie to yourself, convince yourself that that thing is not bogus, that it’s the genuine article. People have done a lot of grotesque things and called it love, but they’ve done it because they’ve had to.”
“What about revenge?” Broussard asked suddenly.
Mary slowly drew her legs up like before, only this time her back was resting against the wall.
“Don’t you ever want revenge?” Broussard persisted.
Mary looked at him. “No,” she said. “He couldn’t help it.”
She was clever. She knew perfectly well what he was getting at. Broussard himself understood revenge. He understood what an adult’s selfishness and a failure to nurture could do to a child. Narcissism was a failure to nurture. Even though the child was involved, the seduction was for the narcissist; the child received none of the incestuous parent’s affection. It was all inner-directed, and the child was little more than a rubber tube in a monkey’s cage. A thing to be used. Broussard remembered his mother’s embrace, the soft depths of her breasts, the nylon between them, and her saying to him that he was the prettiest little girl she had ever held an
d then how he would touch her and she would lay her head back and let him do what he wanted. It all had been for her. And she had never gotten enough. He never had been able to do enough for her, no matter how greedily he satisfied his own priapic curiosity.
58
“I don’t know that much about them,” Palma shouted against the traffic as she turned her back to the afternoon sun coming in through the phone booth glass glazed with dirt and oxidized smog. She had stopped at the first pay phone she could find after she and Grant left Alice Jackson’s house, which meant they had driven only a few blocks and were still deep in the environs of the Third Ward, working their way back under the expressways toward Montrose. She was talking to Leeland.
“We just know he cross-dresses and wears several different styles of blond wigs. The main thing right now is to find out if the unidentified strands found at Samenov’s were wig hairs. I do know that most expensive wigs are made of real human hair. Some of it comes from Indonesia, usually Korea, and some of it comes from Europe. The Korean hair has coarser strands and is less expensive than the European hair, which is a finer texture. Both kinds are often bleached and redyed. But when natural hair color is wanted it has to be European, since Indonesian is only black. Both kinds are used to make blond wigs.”
Palma stopped a moment while a line of trailer trucks pulled around the corner and headed up the ramps to the expressway, their diesel engines laboring and their stacks belching black, oily smoke. When the last one was gone, she continued shouting at Leeland, watching Grant in the car through the dusty glass.
“Since we don’t have a sample of Broussard’s wigs, all we can really determine at this point is whether the hair is wig hair.”
“But if it’s human hair, how do we do that?” Leeland’s voice was faint, even though she could tell he was shouting.
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