PUNISH ME WITH KISSES
William Bayer
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
© 2012 / William Bayer
Copy-edited by: William Bayer
Cover Design By: David Dodd
Background Images used per Creative Common license
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Chapter One
Plans for the summer: Get a tan that'll really last—through Thanksgiving at least. Work on backhand and serve. Be outrageous. Screw every stud on the Godforsaken island. Feast upon the flesh….
There had been a strange quality to her memories of that summer, Penny realized later on, that had reduced those months before the crime to jagged moments indelibly engraved. They were vivid, dreamlike, too, clouded by distortion, as if her angle of vision had been cockeyed.
She'd seen but she hadn't seen—it was something like that, she thought. She'd watched, observed, figured things out a certain way, but in the end had gotten everything wrong.
Bar Harbor had been filled with college kids. There were parties day and night—pot parties, sex parties, sailing parties, parties on the beach, so many they all blurred into one. And the boys who followed after Suzie, those tits-and-ass men from Princeton and Yale, they blurred, too, she thought, into a savage pack. It was as if Suzie gave off a perfume and the boys were dogs who'd caught her scent. They pranced and strutted, were chosen and used; then, discarded, they limped away. It was, Penny thought, a massacre: young men broken one by one upon a battlefield of lust.
She had watched nights from the rocking chair by the open window of her room, making the rockers creak back and forth against the old wooden floor of the Victorian house. The window looked out on the garden and the little cottage by the pool where Suzie played and slept. All summer Penny studied her sister, wondered about her, tried to understand what she was doing down there and why.
It was love that forced her to watch, love for Suzie, deep concern and fear—fear that something was terribly wrong and that there was another story containing a deeper truth hiding in the shadows around the poolhouse at night.
All summer she had read, devoured novels. She flew through Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, flew through the pages, became heady on the words. She hated Bar Harbor and promised herself she'd never spend another summer there again.
On the Fourth of July she watched Suzie move into the poolhouse. Several of her boyfriends helped, former and would-be lovers, stupid Yalies, Princeton jocks. They carried Suzie's clothes and her stereo and her furniture and her waterbed which first, under her supervision, they emptied out the window through a hose. The gardener was annoyed. Penny could tell because of the fierce way he snapped his trimming shears. The contents of the waterbed, poured out the window, turned his flowerbeds into lakes. Her mother watched, too, standing on the terrace, a long frosted goblet in her hand. She didn't say anything, just stood very still—thin, withered, pale—watching Suzie move.
Suzie's explanations: her bedroom was too hot; in the cottage she'd sleep better; she wanted to play her stereo at night without worrying about disturbing other members of the family. Her real reason, Penny knew, was that she wanted to make love to her army of boyfriends without trooping them through the house.
After they helped her the boys got their rewards. Suzie pushed all three of them into the pool and then stood on the edge, hands on her hips, roaring with laughter while they thrashed about. Suzie's best friend, Cynthia French, stood beside her and laughed, too. They wore matching Sarah Lawrence T-shirts and running shorts with racing stripes.
Later, one of the boys, trying to redeem himself, prepared to make a flashy dive. Penny saw Suzie watch him with contempt, then turn away just before his plunge.
"Mother—I'm sick and tired of having sunmarks on my back. All right?"
"Still, dear—"
"Nobody gives a shit, mother. In Europe everyone goes topless on the beach."
"But the gardener, dear."
"Let him gape if it turns him on. For God's sake, mother, who cares what Tucker thinks?"
Mrs. Berring took another sip of gin. "We'll wait and see what your father says."
"He won't say anything I bet."
Suzie was right. When their father came up to Maine that weekend, he didn't say a word. He always favored Suzie, gave her everything she wanted, and when he told stories of his business dealings it was she who listened and understood. They played a game together, chanted aphorisms in unison, little truths about the business world. "Break them or they'll break you."
"The shark'll come if you begin to bleed." Suzie's eyes would gleam as she chanted away. They'd nod together to the rhythm. They were two of a kind, and if Suzie wanted to be outrageous, go around half-naked showing off her boobs, she had his unspoken permission to do that, too.
By her topless swimming and sunbathing she effectively blocked Penny from the pool. This wasn't intentional; Suzie was always nice to her, always encouraging and kind. It was just that even in a bikini (and Penny didn't think she looked good in one) she felt ridiculous beside Suzie—modest, prissy, out-of-place.
Cynthia French went topless, too, and between the two of them they drove everybody mad. Penny, from her rocking chair, spied upon the show: all sorts of unknown boys turning up at odd times to gape and swim; her mother wandering drunk through the garden; boys being pushed in; Suzie and Cynthia leering, roaring; Tucker snapping his shears ever more ferociously.
Penny, standing nude in her bedroom, studied herself before a full-length mirror. She knew she bore a resemblance to Suzie, and she also knew she didn't look like her at all. They had the same gray eyes, but Suzie's danced and shined, the same light brown hair, but Suzie's was glossy, coppery and full. Her own body was too narrow, her flesh too pale, her chest a bit too flat. It wasn't that she was ugly —everything was all right as far as it went. That was the trouble—everything was just "all right." Maybe if she didn't stand so straight. Maybe if she stuck out her rear a little, and bent one knee to lower a hip. That was better, but there was still the problem of her face. It was irregular, uneven, "off." Her profiles didn't match, and she didn't know which side was better. There was something mousy about her, something unsensual, tentative and dull. Suzie had advised her to show more confidence. "Think sexy, Child," she'd said. "Believe me, you'll be sexy then. OK?"
Suzie always called her "Child." She was two and a half years older than Penny, who was nineteen and stil
l in college. Suzie had dropped out of Sarah Lawrence in January, let an apartment and taken a job as assistant to a fashion photographer in New York. She'd quit on him to spend the summer in Maine. Penny overheard her talking to him on the phone: "Well, all right Jamie—I did walk out. I left you stranded. I'm a bitch. OK? If it makes you feel any better, then just think of me as a bitch. OK? All right? Feel better now? And I'll just think of you as one, too. OK?"
Sometimes when she was reading Penny would feel compelled to put down her book and look across the lawn. There was something, she sensed, about to happen, some drama about to be played. She'd try to fight the desire, try to lose herself again in the words of the novel, but sounds would intrude, the whirring of the sprinkler set out to water the lawn, a male bellow from the poolhouse. Tucker's shears, a high-pitched laugh, noise created by Suzie and her friends. Then it was impossible—she would have to raise her eyes.
Sometimes, just to get away, she'd mount her bicycle and ride. She'd have no particular destination in mind; she would simply wander along the network of paths that crisscrossed Mount Desert. Sometimes she'd ride into the forest, find a quiet place, lean her bike against a tree, and lie on the pine-bed staring at the sky. Other times she'd ride along the coast stopping every so often to listen to the surf. She avoided the towns, Bar Harbor and Seal Harbor. There were too many tourists, the yachts outnumbered the fishing boats, and the beautiful weathered gray shingled buildings were festooned with junk for sale.
Suzie sunbathing with Cynthia French, the two of them lying on their stomachs, Suzie's copper hair cascading down her back:
"Sorry, Suze. Thought he'd be OK."
"Yeah."
"Nice arms. Cute ass. You know—"
"Well, he sure wasn't that great a fuck, I can tell you. D, D minus, something like that."
"Wow—I'm sorry. You're really hard to please these days."
"Uh-huh."
"Anyway I don't see what difference it makes."
Suzie laughed, then turned herself over to tan her front.
"Well, I know how you feel, Cin, but it makes a big difference to me." She gave Cynthia a kick. "All right?"
Suzie playing tennis: Penny looked out at the court just in time to see her sister smash down a volley at a lovestruck opponent's feet. She had a special way of showing she was pleased when she made a shot like that. While Cynthia applauded from the sidelines and some other boy who was in love with her (Dartmouth soccer player, Amherst track star—who could tell? They all looked alike anyway) gasped at what she'd done, Suzie stood there with her racket over one shoulder, her other hand resting lightly on her hip, smiling as she watched the ball skid away.
How did she get away with it, savoring her little victories like that? The boys she was always beating at tennis, and shoving off balance and into the pool, seemed to adore her all the more for her abuse. They panted all the harder for her attention and felt all the more fortunate when she finally invited them to join her in the poolhouse for a night. A night was all they usually got, unless they were especially amusing and adept, in which case they were asked back. In the end, though, there would come a morning when they'd be sent away. Then Penny would see them stumbling across the garden, confused, wondering what they'd done to earn Suzie's displeasure, why her passion had turned so quickly to indifference once they'd held her in their arms.
Her mother drank so much she looked mummified by the afternoon, pale and pickled, Penny thought, stumbling about, trying to keep her dignity intact. She'd speak slowly, try too hard to be accurate with her pronunciation, and when she walked in the garden she took slow deliberate steps. Sometimes she just stood in the living room frozen like a statue, looking out through the French doors toward the pool. Once Penny had come upon her like that and, herself unseen, watched with fascination: her mother wasn't still but was trembling, shaking, fists clenched at her sides.
When her father flew in for weekends he seemed to Penny the very essence of success—pressed, cool, boyish, every hair in place, voice soothing, sincere, concealing raw energy and power. Even in his Maine lumberjack's shirt he was the square-jawed boy-wonder entrepreneur. Penny had read an article about him in a business magazine. His holdings in Chapman International were estimated at between seven and eleven million dollars. He had enemies. An unnamed rival called him "sanctimonious." A worshipful subordinate said he was "brilliant," admired his "daring strokes" and "ruthless cuts."
The Berrings slept in adjoining bedrooms. They quarreled in penetrating whispers muffled by the walls. Her mother looked fifteen years older than her father. Sometimes Penny could hear her weep and shriek; her father's voice was always hushed. Their lights were usually off by ten, which was the time Suzie's parties usually began.
Penny didn't find her sister's little dramas of love and torment particularly painful at first. She was a spy, clinically detached, fascinated by the little flashes she saw, the bits of sound she overheard.
Music: that was always the beginning, old mournful out-of-date Bob Dylan tunes, "Just Like a Woman" and "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" played on Suzie's stereo over and over again. There'd be dancing—she'd see the movements through the window, and later, when her parents were asleep, the inevitable nude swim, which Penny could make out clearly or vaguely depending upon the moonlight and the fog. There would be giggling, then, as they wrestled in the water and kissed, and as they moved back to the cottage, naked silhouettes against the shimmering surface of the pool, low murmurs broken by an occasional raucous laugh. They'd be smoking joints, she knew, getting high.
There was evidence, sometimes, to be examined in the dawn: a piece of discarded male underwear half-sinking in the pool, a damp towel or two, reefer butts crushed out against the tiles. Sometimes, very cautiously, Penny would approach the door of the cottage and gaze inside, at Suzie and her lover lying tangled on the waterbed, the sheets pushed away to the sides, the bed undulating slightly as their bodies trembled in sleep. She'd peer in at Suzie's face, blank and passionless. Inhaling deeply she'd catch a whiff of mingled odors: sweat and sex, the stale smoke of pot, and the rich dark aroma of Suzie's perfume, Amazone. Once she saw Cynthia French tangled with them, which meant there'd been an orgy and the nameless boy in the center had been used to satisfy them both.
She'd wonder about the boys as she'd walk softly back to the house to feed the dogs, her bare feet slipping in the grass, cool and moist with morning dew. Those poor beautiful sun-tanned boys dreaming proud dreams of having possessed the most desired girl on the resort. What did Suzie do to them? What scars did she leave? When they grew up, became lawyers and brokers and businessmen, would they look back upon their night or two with her and still feel some residue of pain?
Sometimes Penny could hear the dismissals, Suzie's words so sharp they sliced through the morning fog: "Bye-bye."
"You're kidding."
"Uh-uh. It's bye-bye time."
"What's bugging you?"
"Please just go away."
"Come on, Suze—"
"Bug off—OK? I really want to be alone. Can't you get that through your skull?"
"Look, if I did something—"
"Jes-sus!"
"Okay, if that's the way you want it. You're really being a shit."
"So I'm a shit. So what? I know that—OK? And you're not so great yourself this morning either. You're really not. All right?"
Penny wondered what drove Suzie to perform these nightly rituals of seduction and dismissal. What did she gain by them? Why? Then Penny would think about herself, the outsider watching, imagining the intimate things her sister did. Thinking of herself peering out her window and gazing through the poolhouse door, she felt appalled. Would her own life always be like this? Would the melancholy longing she felt to participate, to put down her books and to live—would that and her painful solitude turn to bitterness until she ended up one of those terse, bony-faced ladies who run needlecraft shops in little towns?
She envied Suzie for doing what she pleas
ed, moving out to the poolhouse, going topless, taking lovers, not caring who watched or what they thought. Better to be an actor, she thought, than to sit in the audience. Better to suffer and cause suffering than to feel nothing but the safe smug superiority of the voyeur, hidden, envious, alone.
Later, looking back upon that summer, asking herself if there'd been an omen of its end, Penny remembered the angry cadence of Tucker's shears.
She met Jared Evans the second week of August. She was bicycling along the cliffs above the sea looking for a place to spread her blanket, lie down out of the wind and read. Then she heard him, shouting, or so she thought until she realized that his words were rhythmic and that he was declaiming against the surf.
It took her a little while to find him—the wind confused her, blew his words about. Finally she spotted a motorcycle, and then she saw him sitting on a rock precipice below the path where the waves were breaking and spewing spray. He was shirtless, his arms wrapped around his jean-clad knees, fighting the sea-roar with a poem:
". . . caught this morning morning's. . .
kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-
dawn-drawn Falcon. . ."
She recognized "The Windhover" at once, she had memorized it her freshman year at Wellesley and had whispered it to herself certain winter nights huddled beneath her blankets in her dormitory room. She moved forward until she found a place above him where she could sit and look directly down upon his dark curly hair and listen.
". . . air, pride, plume. . .
. . . the fire that breaks from thee . . . a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous . . ."
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