Sandcastles

by April Hill

  Gwen gasped. The grotesque images on the canvases were obviously meant to be human beings, each hideously malformed body entangled obscenely with others in a kind of orgiastic dance or a series of savage sexual acts—it was difficult to tell because the painting itself was so dark the oil slathered across the surface of the canvas in great thick slabs of black and gray and umber with slashes and sworls of blood red. And in the exact center an enormous, sickly, green-yellow sun.

  The second painting was even more disturbing. A crimson and black abattoir of sheer gore. Animals of some feral and undefinable species. Slobbering bestial shapes tearing with bloody fangs and claws into the writhing flesh of a smaller creature--its mouth open in a scream of agonized torment. And above the carnage, the sun—the same evil terrifying sun of the first painting.

  “There were about two dozen of these, all pretty much the same. I kept these so you could see them, and maybe understand.”

  Gwen began to cry very softly and Josh knelt on the floor in front of her and took her hands in his.

  “I helped to do that to her Gwen. Can’t you see that?”

  She shook her head violently. “No you didn’t! It was the disease, Josh not you! It had nothing to do with you! Nothing at all.”

  “But because of me, what time she had was used up. On me, on what I wanted and what I didn’t want. All Susannah wanted was to have six kids and live in a big sunny house on a beach in Maine, and instead she wasted her whole life and her talent and then had to die alone and unhappy.”

  Gwen fell to the floor on her knees and threw her arms around his neck. “Please stop, Josh! Please! Just leave it alone! Susannah made that choice for herself! Can’t you see that? I love you and she loved you and everyone sometimes makes choices that stink!”

  Suddenly Denning pushed her away from him, holding her at arm’s length and then amazingly he laughed. “What did you just say?”

  Gwen thought back for a moment and then heard the insult in what she’d said. “Oh God! That’s not what I meant exactly. I meant that we’re all free to make our own choices and sometimes they stink—the choices.”

  He smiled. “Yes?”

  “I’d like to try that again, if you don’t mind,” Gwen said, her face flushed “because what I’m trying to say here without getting sappy is that when you’re young sometimes your choices don’t turn out the way you hoped for, but they’re still yours and nobody else’s. And no matter what happens, it doesn’t mean that you made bad choices, but maybe only stupid ones.... Is that better?”

  He shook his head. “Not a lot. I still come out the bad choice—or the stupid one.”

  Gwen groaned. “You’re going to make me write this out and explain it better, aren’t you?”

  Josh pulled her to him again and kissed her. “Probably. The way I interpret what you just said is that you’re putting me in my place, absolving me of my sins and telling me you love me—all in one overly long and highly ungrammatical sentence. I’d like you to expand on that, but not now. Tomorrow, maybe. This has been a very long night.”

  * * * * *

  They walked back to the house and went to bed exhausted, thinking only of sleep but when they woke two hours later, awakened by the rain slashing on the window, Josh made love to her with an urgency and hunger that surprised both of them in its ferocity. And as the storm peaked just before dawn, they were still awake, talking quietly about the turbulent months that had brought them here.

  “It’s not enough to say I’m sorry about all the lies,” Josh said, stroking her arm thoughtfully. “I’ve got no excuse but a lot of reasons, of course. I didn’t expect this to happen, Gwen. I didn’t expect you to happen. Even after the first weeks when I realized how I felt and began to suspect how you felt, I didn’t think you’d stay. You’ll have to admit that I did my damnedest to scare you off.”

  “Yeah, but at that point I’d have done just about anything for a free meal,” she laughed. “Even clean house. And all that free writing advice from an acknowledged genius? How could I turn that down?”

  “Free?” he repeated.

  “Well, maybe not free, but within my price range, certainly.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “I’m sure. They’re not over are they? I know my grades have slipped lately.”

  He drew her close and kissed her once more then swatted her backside lightly.

  “Okay then, back to work. You’ve got two weeks left.”

  “Two weeks left for what?”

  “To prove you’re ready for the ‘Big Apple’.”

  “New York?” Gwen asked.

  “Yes, if you feel ready. Even if you don’t feel ready, actually. We have appointments—agents, publishers the whole bloody catastrophe.”

  “You’re sure? I thought you hated big cities—places like New York.”

  Josh chuckled. “You should learn never to believe everything you read—or write for that matter. I like New York. It’s a nice place to visit. I just wouldn’t want to live there.”

  “So I’ve heard. You mean we’ll actually eat in restaurants and stay in a hotel, like real people?” Gwen asked.

  “The Plaza, unless you prefer sleeping on a bench in Central Park or in a cardboard box near the Port Authority. To soak up a little local color?”

  “Thanks but the Plaza will be fine. What about being seen? Recognized?”

  “It’s been a long time, and I’m not exactly a household name any longer. We can finish our business during the day and at night gambol among the rich and famous, undetected. Sound interesting?”

  Gwen was ecstatic. “We can go to the theater?”

  “No we can’t. I hate the ‘theater.’ We can take in a show or two, though.”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  “All right then. I’ll make the arrangements. Can I count on you to behave? To not go knocking on publicists’ doors or calling the paparazzi down on us? And giving me your promise not to phone that rag for which you used to work.”

  “And if I do?

  “You get your bare ass blistered in Times Square for the benefit of the tourists.”

  “You can get arrested for that,” Gwen suggested sweetly.

  “In Times Square?”

  Gwen nodded. “Point taken.”

  * * * * *

  The next morning saw the beginning of the most grueling two weeks of Gwen’s life. She had lost days of work, and now there was the genuine possibility that this might really happen—that all these months of rewriting were about to result in serious consideration by a major publisher. Gwen was no fool and recognized perfectly that it was Joshua Denning’s name and stature that would get her in the door but no one was going to invest in or publish a book by an unknown writer on that basis alone.

  It was important to make this manuscript as perfect as she could, not only for herself, but for Josh.

  Which was Joshua Denning’s thought, too.

  During the two weeks before they were to leave for New York, Josh was as anxious about a meeting as he had ever been in his life. As a young writer he had subsisted on very little money and an enormous ego, and when he approached the publishing world for the very first time, he had donned the magic mantle of youth and confidence and attacked that fortress with neither humility nor gratitude.

  “They could have kicked me out a window and thrown Jezreel out after me,” he said, relating the incident to Gwen. “But Susannah bluffed our way in to see some sub-sub associate assistant editor in charge of ass-kissing, then did everything but open the guy’s fly with her teeth until he finally agreed to ‘show it to someone.’ Of course, I thought it was because I was so fucking brilliant that my head glowed with a golden aura. We were down to our last twelve pounds when I got a call from a slightly higher sub-associate assistant asking me to come to London. I borrowed the fare from our landlord, and that was it. From there they sent the manuscript to Lyle Porter in their New York office and he offered me an advance so big I was sure there’d be
en a foul-up and they thought I was somebody else.

  “That doesn’t happen often, Gwen. Maybe never, anymore. You’ll get an interview and a free meal or two with drinks because I’m so charming and because Lyle Porter’s sucking up hoping I’ve got Jezreel II in the can somewhere. After that, your book will have to carry its own weight. If Porter doesn’t bite, we’ll try to get you a slot with a good agent. I think I’ve got that much clout left. If nothing else, I’ll twist Jake Hentoff’s arm—he’s my agent, for all the good it’s done him lately.”

  By late that evening, though, Gwen had decided that New York was a bad idea, after all.

  “We could go some other time, when I’m really ready,” she suggested, slumping dispiritedly on the couch next to him. “It’ll take me a couple of more months. You know, keep trying to make everything better. I don’t want to look like an idiot or an amateur and embarrass you.”

  Josh shook his head. “Just nerves. Go on to bed and get some rest. By this weekend the stories will be as done as they’re going to be. From there on, it’s up to an editor.”

  “Let’s face it, Josh,” Gwen grumbled “these people in New York are only willing to talk to me because of you. Even if they did accept my stuff on some basis or other, it’ll be because—as you so eloquently describe it—they’re sucking up to you.”

  He sighed. “God! I knew I shouldn’t have said that! No, Gwen, I can get you in the front door, period. If they don’t want it, they’ll say so. Take my word for it. I’m not that popular. And I don’t sell books.”

  “Oh yeah!” she pouted. “Like they’re not going to be falling all over themselves to kiss the ass of the almighty Joshua Denning’s no-talent sleep-in bimbo! If it’s all the same to you, I’ll spare myself and you that humiliation! I’m not fucking going to New York, and that’s that!”

  The spanking that followed was perhaps the longest and most embarrassing Gwen had ever brought down upon herself and would be remembered by her as “El Supremo” or the “transcendental spanking.”

  Over Gwen’s wail of complaint, Josh went to the den to get the wooden paddle, then returned, rolled his sleeves up and took a vigorously protesting Gwen across his lap, pushing her further forward until her head nearly touched the floor. She had known the second the negative words were out of her mouth that she was in trouble, and now with Josh’s mood what it was, she could do little more than wish with all her heart that she had gone to bed on schedule and watched “Letterman.”

  Had there been such thing as a category of her least-favored positions, being bent over his knee like this—like a disobedient child, would have topped Gwen’s list. With her rear end angled almost perfectly for the coming assault, Gwen groaned as he pulled her pajama bottoms down to her ankles, pushed the top out of his way and circled her waist with one strong arm. Such careful and “considerate” preparations generally meant a very long hard session with the paddle during which he would have to be careful not to land a blow too high near the small of her back. In the entire time Josh had been painfully spanking her, this cautious “modus operandi” had resulted in no “important” bruising, only the faintest of lasting welts, and despite his constant use of that extremely disagreeable word no “blistering.”

  Chafed, burning, sore-to-the-touch, scorched and achy—she had suffered all these reactions more than once. A hard spanking with the wooden hairbrush left the cheeks of her ass a blotched mass of livid red ovals. He had frequently left stinging, itching lines across her butt and thighs with a switch, and occasionally even her lower legs had been subject to the same painful switching. And when he occasionally used a belt to provide “incentive,” Gwen was usually left with wide, fiery strap-marks and a lasting dull throb. Each implement left its own mark and its own particular brand of discomfort, but Gwen would have testified that for sheer howling agony, there was nothing like a forceful, prolonged, over-the knee-walloping with the paddle of Joshua Denning’s own manufacture.

  And this one was to make all the prior “wallopings” pale in comparison.

  “We are going to New York.” he said, as he brought the paddle down with a prodigious crack, dead center on her right cheek, then repeated the action perhaps a dozen times on alternating cheeks, “where you are going to work your ass off to sell this damned book!” Gwen howled, trying frantically to reach back, only to have her arm pinioned securely behind her as he applied the next dozen, just slightly lower but considerably harder.

  “You’re going to wear a good suit, which I will purchase for you upon our arrival and have your hair cut by someone other than Francine’s ‘Salon de Beaute’.” He delivered another torrent of blows to the crowns of both her throbbing buttocks, applying the paddle with increased ardor when she almost succeeded in squirming loose. When he tightened his grip around her waist and began again, Gwen bucked and kicked, shrieking in outrage and adding an ill-advised string of obscenities. Josh sighed and took quick advantage of her opened legs to apply a flurry of stinging blows to the insides of her thighs.

  “You are going to exude confidence mixed with humility and speak politely but firmly about what you expect and what you promise,” he went on, applying a second barrage of stinging swats between her thighs before trapping her kicking legs under one of his. When he started on the backs of her thighs and then on her thus-far-untouched flanks, Gwen settled into a steady moan, pounding her one free fist on the floor, then wailing in pain and disbelief as he leveled a final dozen, equally divided between both already-scalded buttocks.

  “If you so much as mention my name after initial introductions or make disparaging remarks about yourself or your work in my presence there is an excellent chance that I will bend you over Lyle Porter’s fake Louis XIV desk and whale the living daylights out of your bare ass in front of one of the deities of American publishing.”

  With one last smack, he finished. “Now have I made myself clear?” he asked breathlessly.

  For a moment, Gwen lay where she was, as out of breath as he, then pushed herself up off his lap. Carefully she put her hands behind her and tried to explore her throbbing rear end, then thought better of it. Wisely putting distance between herself and Josh before pulling up her wrinkled pajama bottoms, Gwen raised them very slowly, wincing as the fabric brushed against her fiery ass.

  “Any questions?” he asked, turning the paddle over to admire his workmanship. “Complaints? Comments?”

  Gwen scowled and finally ventured a careful rub to her sore buttocks. “Okay, so maybe I had that coming—part of it, anyway, but do I have to get another haircut?”

  He nodded trying not to smile. “Yes, and as much as I know you hate it, you’re going to have to wear shoes, too. Think of it as the high price of success.”

  Gwen sighed deeply and shook her head.

  “Yeah, but remember what you told me? What Thoreau said about ventures requiring new clothes?”

  “Even Thoreau probably wore panty hose when he went to see his publisher,” Josh assured her with a wink.

  * * * * *

  Her rear end was still a bit swollen and under the weather the next morning when they discussed plans to get married while in New York.

  Gwen shook her head. “Would you be upset if I said let’s wait ‘til we get back from this trip—for the wedding?”

  “No, not of that’s what you want. Is there a reason you want to wait?”

  “You mean besides the fact that I’ll have to sleep on my stomach on my wedding night?” she quipped. “I don’t know, Josh. I just feel kind of... I don’t know... harried maybe—with everything that’s going on. I guess I’ve always thought of being married as a little more peaceful?”

  He nodded. “All right. I’m sorry. I suppose I kind of threw this all at you without giving the idea enough thought. I didn’t even think about all that, to be honest. You’re right, though. We’ll just get the interviews over and then take it easy for the rest of the trip. How’s that?”

  When Gwen agreed, he looked across the table a
t her more closely, trying to see a sign of unease. “You’re not having second thoughts are you?”

  Gwen shook her head. “No, Josh. No second thoughts. But I would appreciate a short breather. It’s a pretty big step you know—for both of us.”

  And so the agreement was made to wait but Josh had still not spoken the three simple words that would have relieved the worst of Gwen’s fears.

  Chapter Ten

  “Safe upon the rugged rocks the ugly houses stand;

  Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.”

  - Edna St. Vincent Millay-

  “Millay was from Maine, you know,” Josh said, leafing through one of the books Gwen was packing to take with her to New York. “Rockport—near where Susannah and I lived once. She was a very big local celebrity—when people still read poetry.”

  “By candlelight” Gwen said, softly. “I always read her by candlelight when I was a teenager and desperately in love. Unrequited of course.”

  Josh smiled and kissed her very gently. “The best kind of love for candlelight and poetry. Leave the book at home. You’re not going to need it, I promise you.”

  And so with the dogs in the able care of Linda Hanley, Josh’s reliable “house-sitter” and extra copies of the manuscript tucked in their luggage for reference, the assault on the Big Apple was almost a reality.

  “Where do you want to get married, when we get back?” he asked. “My God! I just realized I’ve never even asked about your family. Do you have family you want to contact? Your mother, maybe? I hadn’t thought of a big ceremony but if that’s what you want….”

  “I’ll tell my mother later,” Gwen groaned. “Let’s not risk her showing up. I called her again a few days ago and told her we might be getting married, and her main concern was whether you were Jewish. Mother thinks all writers are Jewish or communists—or Jewish communists. Or black. She’s not too thrilled by that, either, or about gay people. If you were a black Jewish communist and gay, I could promise you your mother-in-law would never come to visit. As it is, you’ll probably only be stuck with my mother for Christmas unless you’re a Druid. Most of my friends aren’t really close. I think I mentioned that I’m not what you could call a social butterfly. And I’ve always hated big weddings.”