Long Island Noir

by Kaylie Jones

  When we met, I was a college senior, a tall, long-legged runner with curly strawberry-blond hair pulled back from my face. I was given to wearing jogging shoes, tank tops, and shorts, adding a sweatshirt when the weather was cool.

  Casey was nearing fifty, tall and lean, with a firm jaw and silvery hair. He painted massive canvases of large-breasted women dressed in suburban drag.

  “What do you think?” he said when he approached me at the drinks table at his show in a gallery near campus. I was flattered. I had seen the sharply positive reviews of his work in the New York Times. From his bio on the gallery wall I knew he had paintings hanging in museums all over the world. He took me out for lobster after the opening. He laughed a lot, a low chuckle. He reached out a couple of times and flipped my hair off my face, but otherwise he didn’t touch me. He drove me back to the gallery to get my car, and asked me out to dinner again.

  I was used to guys my own age. He talked more than they did. I listened. Every time he sold a painting at his gallery in the city, he boasted, the dealer sent him a check for $150,000. That was minus the commission. “Someone out there likes my work,” he said. He was getting another $60,000 a year as a consultant to a museum in Amsterdam. He didn’t say what he did for them.

  The first time he took me sailing, I nearly got knocked out of the boat several times, blindsided by the boom or whatever it was called. He laughed a lot at that. He had grown up on sailboats. I had seen them from the beach, and from the Sag Harbor Long Wharf, where I took ice cream breaks from my summer job waitressing at a fish restaurant. But I’d never been aboard.

  I wore a relatively modest black-and-white-striped bikini and sandals. He wore a white jersey and khaki shorts, boat shoes, no socks. He sailed to an inlet he knew, served grilled tuna, orzo salad, and sauvignon blanc. He asked if I wanted to sunbathe topless. “No one around but us,” he said.

  “No,” I replied. He chuckled and called me old-fashioned. He reached over and dabbed zinc oxide on my nose.

  Casey waited until I was wearing his engagement ring before he brought me by his older sister Patty’s house in Bridgehampton.

  He made a point of mentioning that I’d grown up in Sag Harbor. And he told her my age.

  “Ah, twenty,” Patty said. “Where were we when you were twenty, Casey? Italy? Yes, that was the summer we all had such a ball in Cortina. I was dating that awful Englishman.” She turned to me. “He used to drink two bottles of red wine at lunch and simply pass out.” Back to Casey. “And you were with, which one was it? Glenda the good witch. Came from the Midwest, looked like Grace Kelly, had promised her parents she would stay a virgin until the wedding deed was done.”

  Patty was tall and lean like Casey, with the same startling blue eyes. Casey had let his hair go gray. Patty colored hers a shade of beige I assumed was expensive.

  “What color was Casey’s hair when he was my age?” I asked.

  “Strawberry-blond like yours,” he said.

  “Dishwater, ashy, not really blond, not really red,” Patty said.

  By the end of the afternoon Casey had convinced Patty to handle the wedding. “Rhonda’s parents are of modest means,” he said teasingly. “Let’s make it easy for her.”

  We were married on a warm September day on the beach behind Patty’s house. As we stood in the receiving line afterward, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the surfers riding the incoming waves.

  “Think of this room as a place in which you can do anything you want, anything you can imagine,” Casey said on our wedding night. He had ushered me into his master bedroom a few hours after all the guests had driven back to the city and Patty had sent us off on our “honeymoon” at Casey’s house in Southampton.

  That night he began taking the Polaroids. He’d put together costumes for me to wear, isolating one or another erotic part of my body. “Just for us, later,” he explained.

  He talked constantly in bed. If he brought up something he wanted to do and I resisted, he called me neurotic. He began to use that word a lot. He also used the word lick and the word crave and the word orifice a lot. I assumed that was what happened when you got married. You adapted to each other’s tastes. Just as later we chose the beach house together.

  In the new place, he brought home tropical-tasting lubricants, moved on to “first-time” appliances with several speeds and pop-it beads he’d originally tried in Tijuana before I was born. Over time I realized that the quality of agreeableness that had served me well with everyone else in my life to date might, with him, become a liability. As he pushed me past each threshold, I began to say no. He cajoled and pressured. Over time, that became his favorite part of the game. He needed the accoutrements, the sense of sport.

  One night I watched him watching me and watching himself in the mirror over our bed with a cold gaze. No doubt he was calculating curves he could use in his next painting. There was a growing resemblance between his new paintings and my body. My body was selling well.

  Finally I pushed him away. I told him I wanted what I wanted.

  I used the word hate. And despise. Feathers appealed to me more than spikes and leather and cameras and videos, I told him. I imagined birds, floating and perching here and there like carnival creatures. Leda and the swan.

  He produced a whip.

  I refused.

  He insisted.

  I said I didn’t want to hurt him.

  He said I wouldn’t be hurting him.

  He pushed the handle of the whip into my hands.

  I refused to grip.

  “Damn it,” he said. He slapped me.

  I shoved him away and ran downstairs. I threw on a shift and thongs I kept in the mudroom for after the beach, grabbed my shoulder bag, and left.

  “The bastard,” Sally said. “And that sister of his.”

  She and I were sharing avocado-shiitake sushi and vegetarian miso that Friday night. The restaurant was across the street from the tiny apartment I’d rented over a bookshop on Main Street. After I left Casey, I got a job right off the bat managing the college website. It was demanding work, coping with viruses and updates and system maintenance and trying to keep the design clean and easy to use. Not as creative as I might have wanted, but it paid well, and I had to cut back on expenses, living on my salary alone.

  The minute I was single again, Sally had suggested we meet for dinner at a different restaurant each Friday night. Sally knew the ropes. She was almost thirty, single a long time, picky. She only went out with men she met through someone she trusted, and only on Saturday nights. The rest of the time she filled with dinners with girlfriends, Italian classes, hikes, bike rides, kayaking. Sally was barely five feet tall. She kept herself trim, wore her dark hair short and her skirts just above the knee. Standing next to her, at five-eight, I felt monstrous. And I felt worst about myself on Friday nights. During the week work kept me busy.

  “When did that stuff start?” Sally asked while picking at her sushi with chopsticks. I was eating mine by hand.

  “You mean the costumes?”

  “Well, whatever it was.”

  “I’m not sure you want to know … or I want to say.”

  “Did you know when you got married?”

  “Beforehand, he was, Whatever you want, as if I were calling the shots. Hah.”

  “Do you think you ought to see someone?”

  “See, like date?”

  “I mean a shrink. Maybe there’s some sort of emotional damage?”

  “Nothing that wouldn’t disappear if I could think of some way of getting back at him.”

  I didn’t feel hurt anymore. I didn’t feel shame. When Sally asked, it took me awhile to define what I felt. I was furious. How dare he.

  “Think about it,” Sally said. “If you decide you want to talk to someone, I can suggest a friend. And you should know that Patty is spreading the worst rumors.”

  “I know. She’s busy pumping up Casey’s profile. There was a photo of him in the local paper, honored for donating a pa
inting to be sold at auction with the proceeds going to a retreat for abused women. Meanwhile, I’m getting these heavybreather phone calls at all hours. I think it’s him.”

  “You know how to stop that, don’t you?” Sally explained how she could punch a few keys on the telephone pad and give the caller a shrill whistle. “A cop friend told me about it. As for Patty, I suspect she’s helping set you up for a bad settlement in the divorce.”

  “It’s hard enough living on my income out here.”

  We split the check and I headed back to my apartment. I missed the sound of the ocean at night. I missed my things.

  A few months after the split, some stock I had inherited from my mother’s father suddenly went up from $25,000 to $200,000. I had money to play around with. When Sally came by for coffee early one Sunday morning, I got an idea for the game I wanted to play.

  “Guess who just rented a house in Sagaponack?” Sally asked.

  “Someone I know?”

  “Exactly. Your ex. Six bedrooms. A sauna. Walking distance to the beach. Did you see the Science Times this week?”

  “I didn’t have time.”

  “I saved it for you. Take a look at the piece on revenge. It’s so you. Listen to this: Acts of personal vengeance reflect a biologically rooted sense of justice that functions in the brain something like appetite.”

  I nodded.

  “And here’s the kicker: The urge for revenge is even stronger than lust.”

  Casey’s new house was a nondescript McMansion across from potato fields. I drove by several times a day to get a sense of his routine. He was still living the artist’s life, with irregular hours. But every morning he spent a few hours at the gym.

  Breaking-and-entering was new to me. Luckily, the lock on the back door was flimsy. I slid in with my backpack of equipment.

  The wireless video camera was tiny, impossible to detect. It fit neatly into the smoke detector in the ceiling of his new bedroom. The hookup took awhile. He had a new duvet cover in a faux-leopard print. He had his pants press set up in one corner. I slid open the closet door. A neat row of dark shirts and pants. He was addicted to Armani. The floor was littered with his shoes. I opened the drawer of the bedside table. Condoms, half a dozen sticky bottles of lubricant.

  The bedside clock told me I had been there more than an hour. Time to go. And I was eager to see if the setup worked.

  Back in my office, I logged in the coordinates of the site. With a click of the mouse I could see the empty room, ready to fill with images.

  I wanted to give him a name that fit his persona. Kinky was the first word that came to mind. I Googled kinky. There were millions of sites. Under Casey’s first name I discovered an Antarctic webcam: Casey Station. Nineteen degrees below zero Celsius. Frozen tundra was too good for my darling.

  I tried kinky sex. There were about three times as many sites as kinky, ranging from the direct—kinky sex, strap-on dildo sex, kinky girls—to the educational:

  Restraint, role-playing, domination, erotic punishment, and discipline are all parts of the BDSM scene. The term “fetish” is used loosely to describe any general turn-on that might not fall into mainstream sexuality, such as leather or vinyl clothing, food-play, or certain parts of the body not normally associated with sexuality … Find other likeminded people in your area or around the world!

  I didn’t want Casey to be watched by others like him. I wanted him to attract a broader audience. People who would be shocked. I decided on kinkycasey.com.

  I inserted Casey’s new webcam data into the virtual voyeur’s hub of choice to kick up the traffic. With a few clicks of the mouse, the camera was broadcasting live over the Internet from his bedroom. Anyone could watch whatever he was doing. It was all there. I had access to that, and whatever kinky sex sites linked to him in return. I would archive it all. And someday, when the time was right, I would send him the link and wait for the fireworks.

  It wasn’t long before the traffic numbers began to spike. Three months in, Casey was becoming notorious among the “peeping toms” on the web. I waited until he was at his bedroom computer alone one night before I shot him the link. I watched on the webcam as he scrolled for a few minutes, then stood up, hefted his laptop, and threw it against the wall. Aha.

  On the off chance I push him over the edge, I am making this podcast and uploading it to a spot on the web where only you, Sally, have the password. I know I can trust you to leave it alone unless something happens to me …

  PART IV

  American Dreamers

  SEMICONSCIOUS

  BY STEVEN WISHNIA

  Lake Ronkonkoma

  Jefferson stirred to semiconsciousness. Dim and distorted, like his brain was a dark dungeon of bruised meat. Terrible dolor in his head. Tongue groping around in his mouth. Something was very wrong here. It tasted dry and foul and metallic, scabby and membrane-oozy textures, only empty spots where several teeth used to be.

  In a grove of thin trees. Next to a pile of beer cans and 40s. Budweiser. Pabst Blue Ribbon. Coors Silver Bullet. Olde English 800. Steel Reserve.

  Must be behind the strip of shops.

  Fuck, my head hurts.

  Ribs in agony. Worse than the head. Ay Dios, and I thought that was the mother of all hangovers. Memory cracked open in the rain of pain. Fucking cabrones kicked the shit out of me, an evil centipede of Nikes booting my chest like a whole fucking team taking penalty kicks.

  He tried to lift himself up. One elbow. Failed. Fell. Never mind the knees, they’re collapsed like a cane-stalk house in an earthquake.

  The bloody crust on his lips tasted faintly of tomatoes. He made it up onto his left elbow and puked. A pink-brown-red sunset of stale beer and bloodclots. He passed out again.

  That’s where they found him two hours later. Strapped him onto a stretcher, head belted and braced to avoid any further damage, rolled him up and clipped him into the ambulance. Outside and above red and yellow and blue strobe lights and sirens cleared the way, assaulting his wounded brain.

  Danny Seltzer said goodbye to his aging parents in Delray Beach, in one of the waveform high-rises that walled the coast of South Florida. He drove down I-95, dropped off the rental car, and got on line. He removed his sneakers and watch, emptied his pockets, and placed the lot in the gray plastic bin—the national-security jailhouse rigmarole of flying, empty your pockets, take off your shoes and belt, get patted down. To complete the metaphor, foreigners coming into the country had to get fingerprinted and mug-shot.

  The bottom of the bin had an ad for Zappos, a shoe-selling website. What would history have been like if other cultures had the same mania for advertising and sponsorship? Paris 1793: a billboard on the guillotine proclaiming, Bic: The National Razor! Valencia, Spain, 1491: an auto-da-fé framed by pillars depicting the tonsured head of Torquemada, his outstretched arm wielding a small torch, touting, Fuego de Dios: The Official Matches of the Holy Inquisition.

  His cell phone rang the minute the plane taxied toward the gate at LaGuardia. Lisa Vitaliano, his editor at the Paumanok Weekly. She’d already left two voicemails and three texts. There’d been an assault in Lake Ronkonkoma, possibly fatal. It might be racial.

  Bloodofpatriots says:

  The Federal Octopus is pursuing me. Osorio is an illegal alien. He’s from Mexico.

  RealAmerican says:

  He’s from Puerto Rico. He’s an anchor baby.

  Mike from Smithtown says:

  His real name is Castro. He’s covering it up to hide that he’s a Communist. He’s Fidel’s son.

  LiptonLady55 says:

  That’s his mother’s name. He’s a bastard. She was a prostitute in the South Bronx.

  A cybermassive grapevine proliferated with accusations that the new U.S. president, Juan Ernesto Osorio, was not born in the United States, but in Mexico. Or Cuba. Or one of those bean-queen places.

  His birth certificate said he was born in the Bronx, on July 16, 1965, at Morrisania Hospital, the son of Juan Wil
mer Osorio, a solo-practice lawyer with a small office on Courtlandt Street off 149th, and the former Aracely Castro, who would take a leave of absence from her job as a sixth-grade teacher. Both were born in Puerto Rico, Juan in San Juan, Aracely in Carolina, where her older brother Papo played shortstop on a team whose right fielder was a rifle-armed kid named Roberto.

  On April 24, 1966, the Daily News printed little Juan’s picture on its “Bronx Cuties” page, along with Maureen Gallagher, Teresa Ippolito, Elijah James, Jacqueline Barretto, Ramona Puente, Yvonne Bronson, Joseph Anthony Genzale, Gerald Nolan, Deona and Matthew DiMucci, Michelle Romero, Shelley Renee Koslowitz, Glenroy Neville, and James Slattery. A busload of big-eyed babies immortalized on newsprint in ashy gray ink.

  From www.letfreedomring.com:

  Yes, my fellow American patriots, they say the facts are obvious, they say the documentation is there, they say we are deluded fools for caring that our great nation is led by a dangerous alien. They say they have evidence, that it is not so.

  Their so-called birth certificates and newspaper announcements are forgeries. And remember that there are powers greater than those of man, powers that we must call on God’s help to resist and constantly defend our homeland’s security against.

  There is only one entity in the universe that has the power to perform such a forgery. There is only one entity in the universe that has the power to plant such an evil seed and care for it until it bears its poisonous fruit: The Evil One. 666. The Number of the Beast.

  We have the number of this beast. Osorio is the Antichrist. It is our sacred duty as God-fearing, freedom-loving Americans to stop him in every way we can.

  Thank you for reading, and Let Freedom Ring!