Punish Me with Kisses

by William Bayer

  She moved forward then, moved so quickly Penny couldn't hold her back, moved between the two great furnaces, picked up an iron poker that was hanging there, and used it to unlatch and pull open one of the furnace doors. She stepped back then, in the face of the fire and heat, and suddenly she looked mad to Penny, crazed, like her father when she'd watched him burn trash that time in Maine, but maybe even crazier, like a madwoman, the flames dancing in her eyes, her flesh orange, reflecting the fire. And then she reached into her pocket, pulled out the stocking, Suzie's Christmas stocking, and flung it into the furnace. The two of them watched it incinerate, shrivel in an instant to ash. Her mother pushed the poker viciously at the furnace door and slammed it shut.

  "Well, that's the end of that," she cried. "That's the end of the Christmas stocking of that miserable little slut."

  Penny was horrified, gasped at the wild expression on her mother's face, but almost immediately her mother became docile, her body sagged, and Penny had to guide her up the stairs. She turned her over to Mrs. McIver who said it was time for Mrs. Berring's nap.

  "Is she always like this?" Penny asked while she was waiting for her cab. Mrs. McIver gave her a quizzical look as if she weren't sure what Penny meant.

  "She seems so normal, then suddenly these strange personalities appear."

  "She's been excited about your coming out. She's tired now, and overwrought."

  "At least she was consistent when she was drinking."

  Mrs. McIver shrugged. "That's an illusion. Family members often say things like that. The alcohol just covers things up. She was drinking herself to death."

  On the train, riding back to the city, Penny thought about the afternoon. It had been the most painful visit she could remember. To see her mother like this, to see the range of her disturbance, her hatred for her husband, the loathing and the ways she coped with it, the blandness interrupted by the conspiratorial smile, interrupted in turn by open rage, and then that cry as she'd thrown the stocking into the furnace—all the hurt of Suzie's death was in that cry, she thought, all the mourning, the sense of loss, bound up in that act, as if she could exorcise Suzie and the horror of her murder by burning up a sentimental reminder and calling her a "slut."

  What a sham, she thought, as the train pounded back into the city, through Harlem, past tenements which she knew had no heat, were full of roaches and rats, where people lived huddled six, eight, God knew how many to a room. They envy us, rich white people out in Greenwich and Scarsdale and Westport, but they have love and soul and body warmth, and we're just cold and cursed with madness and filled with cruelty and pain.

  She and Jared had planned to go to a movie that night. She'd told him which train she'd be on, and he met her, as arranged at Grand Central. But she was so depressed about the afternoon that they decided to go back uptown and spend the evening at home. It was dark as their taxi sped up Park Avenue, and though she wanted to explain it to him, describe the afternoon in all its gruesome detail, she found it difficult. She was stuck on that image of Suzie's Christmas stocking shriveling in the furnace; she could focus only on that, and on her mother's exclamation: "slut!"

  "It was like everything was burning up," she said. "Of course she's been dead for more than three years, but in her diary she seemed to come alive again, and then watching that stocking go up in flames and hearing mother speak of her like that—it was like she was dead this time for good."

  They got out at Eightieth, he put his arm around her, and they walked the remaining half block to the house. The heat was on in the building and the lobby was as pungent as ever with the smell of cats. He got his key out as they mounted the stairs, but then, when they reached the apartment door, they both stood still in shock. The door was open a couple of inches, and the "unpickable" locks she'd paid a hundred fifty dollars for were drilled out. At the sight of that, the broken locks, the metal filings on the floor, she began to tremble.

  "Shhh." Jared brought his finger to his mouth. "I'd better go in first and check." She nodded, knowing how dangerous it could be to confront burglars in the act. He appeared half a minute later. "All clear, but you're not going to like the mess."

  She followed him in to find every single thing she owned in disarray. Every book was tumbled out of the bookcases, every plate and glass had been swept off of every kitchen shelf, every drawer had been turned over and emptied, the mattress was upside down, the rugs were pulled out, and the cushion of her window seat, the treasured cushion upon which she'd passed so many happy hours, had been ripped open with a knife. She felt violated.

  "Fucking addicts," Jared said. "Funny—the TV and stereo are still here. And your typewriter. That's the kind of stuff they like to take."

  Penny stared at the mess, moving carefully from room to room. It seemed to her that, somehow, everything was wrong.

  "I don't know why they bothered," Jared said, pointing at the cushion. "Pure hostility, I guess. We could call the police but it won't do any good. Funny they didn't take the TV."

  A thought flashed into her mind. "Maybe they were looking for the diary."

  "Oh, come on. That's a lot of crap."

  She pulled it out of her purse. "I took it with me to read on the train. Maybe there's something in it. They wanted to get it, see what we've found out."

  "You're crazy. You're so hung up on that thing you think everyone else is, too. What do you mean 'They were after it?' Who exactly is this 'they'?"

  She asked herself the same thing. She wasn't sure, didn't know whom she meant. But she was sure the break-in wasn't the work of appliance thieves. Her apartment had been ransacked. Whoever had broken in had made a search.

  "There's something in here," she said, clutching the diary.

  "Babe—" He took her hand. "No one knows about the diary. We're the only ones. Even if there is something there's just the two of us, and Cynthia, of course. But she doesn't even know we got it, so what you're saying doesn't make much sense."

  "Then why is everything still here? My Nikon. My jewelry."

  He shrugged. "Maybe they were scared or something. Maybe they heard a noise, got scared and ran." He started picking things up while trying to calm her, but she was dialing the phone before he noticed she'd walked away.

  "Who—?"

  "Shhh." she said. It was ringing now at the other end.

  "The police won't give a shit. There's nothing stolen."

  She motioned for him to shut up. "Hi. Cynthia. This is Penny. Yeah—there's something important I have to know."

  She knew right away there was something; she could tell by the way Cynthia paused. There was a shyness, an embarrassment in her voice. No, she'd never told anybody about the diary before, but yes, there was something, and she'd been meaning to call Penny about it, had wanted to call her but had put it off, and was a little embarrassed about it actually.

  "What, Cynthia? Just tell me what you're talking about." Jared had stopped trying to wrestle the mattress back into place and was standing in the center of the bedroom watching while she listened to Cynthia explain.

  "Couple days after we talked these two guys came around. Very polite, you know, middle-aged, sort of uncley types, and they flashed these IDs, private investigators' cards. Said they were looking into the Berring case. Said they knew you'd been to see me, and then you'd left town suddenly, had driven up to Maine. Asked if I had any idea why you might have left like that, whether it was connected to our talk."

  "And so you told them about the diary, right? Right?"

  "Yeah, I did. But then I pooh-poohed the whole thing. I guess I should have kept my mouth shut, but they were so nice and everything that I thought, well, you know—what's the harm" She paused. "I would have called you, but then I sort of felt ashamed. I don't know how deeply this thing goes. I'm really sorry, Child. Hope I haven't screwed you up."

  "Never mind, Cin," she said. "It's OK. Really OK."

  It hit her then, even before she replaced the phone. It all came together, everything, lik
e the blocks in one of those mind-twisting puzzles when they suddenly fall into place and the puzzle is revealed and you could kick yourself for not having seen it all before. Middle-aged private investigators—that sounded like retired cops, the sort who staff out corporate security departments, like the security department at Chapman. Her mother saying Tucker had called her father and told him she'd been up in Maine. Her father telling her the day they'd played squash that his people had Jared under surveillance, which meant, of course, that they were watching her as well. And now this break-in just when she'd be away in Greenwich. It was so pat, so obvious, the events so neatly linked. They'd learned about the diary from Cynthia; they knew she'd gone to Maine to get it; they knew from Tucker she'd only spent fifteen minutes in the poolhouse. So they knew she had it now. All they had to do was wait until she left for Greenwich, then break in, find it, find out what it said.

  She was explaining all this to Jared as rationally as she could, and then it started jumbling out of her in a mad rush of words, and then he was staring at her, listening intently, incredulous at first, not quite understanding what she meant.

  "The lover," she said, "don't you see? The Dark Man of the dairy—so cold, aloof, and Suzie's terrible hurt, her pain. Then her crazy summer project, trying to catch his attention, punish him by flaunting herself, or maybe win his sympathy and inspire a renewal of his love. I knew she was carrying on too loudly, exaggerating her behavior, making sure she was heard and seen. The audience—Jesus! Listen to this." She had the diary open, was flipping through the pages, looking for words and clues. "She calls the cottage 'my arena.' On the next page she calls it 'my stage.' She writes that she's 'performing.' All the time I thought she was doing it for me, but now I see she wasn't doing that at all."

  "Then what was she doing?" Jared asked, sitting down on the bed.

  "Don't you see? Put yourself in front of the cottage then look back up at the house. All the bedrooms look down on you—not just mine, but my father's and mother's too. God —she tips it off all over the place, even with this stuff about Fitzgerald, 'Devereux and Nicole.' It was him she was in love with. It was him, for Christ's sake. My father."

  "Wait—you're going too fast. Who's this Devereux? Who's Nicole?"

  "Characters in Tender Is the Night. Devereux Warren and his daughter, Nicole. He freaks her out by taking her to bed."

  "You're saying your father and Suzie—"

  "It had to be. Look at this stuff." She opened the diary to another part. "She imagines him being sucked by a mulatto mistress. How could anyone imagine her father like that? She was always his favorite. They had these games, these little sayings they used to chant. They'd whisper together and hold hands. Then something happened, messed her up, and she quit college and started to go berserk. She did all those crazy things with Jamie Willensen, went to that orgy in the suburbs, tried to destroy herself, burn away her memories. Listen to the way she longs for him: 'Why doesn't he pay attention anymore?' Listen to this: 'Broken-hearted I weep and rage.' God—what agony! It's all here. She wanted to destroy herself. She wanted to be dead."

  "That's what I always said."

  "Cynthia thought so, too. Said Suzie had her own game going, that there was something she was trying to do. Listen to all this cryptic stuff: 'do what I have to do'; 'something's rubbed off on me'; her fascination with a cold and powerful man, her worry that Cynthia will 'mess up all my plans.' She sends him photos of the orgy hoping to infuriate him. She follows him on Fifth Avenue, weeps and rages, then searches desperately for someone else. She tries S&M to 'cauterize my wounds,' but that doesn't work—she can't shake him off. He's cold to her. Always cold. After their affair he won't touch her, so she dreams up the 'summer project,' to fuck everybody she can find right in front of him, under his windows up in Maine. Jesus—even when she's little she asks him to 'punish me with kisses.' In Maine she wants him to come down and punish her. Listen: 'Punish me for being bad.' What she really wants is for him to come down and make love to her again, cradle her, make it right. But he just sat up there watching her in silence. Just watching. And then she snapped."

  She started to cry then; she couldn't help herself. It was so sickening and perverse, and also so very sad. That's what made her cry—the awful sadness of it. Suzie's terrible misery. The diary was one great cry of pain. Thinking of Suzie writing it, trying to sound tough yet crying out, then pining for her father, pining away for him, going through all those mad gyrations, torturing herself, degrading herself, waiting for him to come down and hold her, or punish her, or scream at her, or, as she'd written, waiting at least for his "applause"—all that made her cry.

  It was eight o'clock and she was still crying, sitting on the bed amid the wreckage of her apartment, weeping, weeping, while Jared held her and whispered to her and rocked her back and forth. She couldn't control herself—the tears just flowed. She couldn't stop, so she wept on, gasping sometimes, thinking she would never stop. They must have spent another half-hour like that until finally she sat up and looked at him, and then they set to work ordering the apartment.

  They put everything back where it belonged, and what was ruined—the cushion, the broken glasses and plates—they packed up into garbage bags which Jared hauled downstairs and set out on the street. Then she tried to make a salad of some leftovers in the refrigerator, but it didn't taste very good and they weren't hungry anyway, so they threw that out, too. Jared said first thing in the morning he'd call a locksmith and have an iron-rod lock installed. He suggested, too, that she Xerox the diary, and maybe put the original in a safety deposit box or someplace, because if people from Chapman Security pulled black-bag break-in jobs like this, then there was no telling what they might do next if they wanted that diary enough.

  She nodded while he was saying this, still dazed by what had happened, all the revelations, and now by thoughts of incest—what that really meant. Jared was still talking, and she wasn't really listening to him until she suddenly realized that what he was saying was really terrible, much worse than anything she'd even begun to think.

  "—So you see what we're up against. He could do anything. I'm thinking maybe I should go to Schrader, and have him contact the police."

  "Why?"

  "Well, it's damn clear now that your dad was the murderer. He shined that flashlight at me, then he knocked me down."

  She wanted to scream at him to stop, but when she opened her mouth she couldn't make a sound. He was oblivious to her anyway, pacing around the apartment, talking, gesticulating, checking his points off on his fingers as if he had everything figured out, and listening to him, trying to make sense of what he was saying, she began to feel sick.

  "When you said Suzie snapped, I saw it right away. Of course it wasn't Suzie who snapped. It was him. Your dad. He snapped. He was enraged by what she was doing down there, crazy on account of it. And afraid, too, of course, and with good reason—maybe she'd tell on him, tell what he'd done to her, and that could ruin him, undermine his position at Chapman, shake the faith of his stockholders, all that crap he worries about. So he's just like the guy I always imagined, except he wasn't a humiliated college jock. But it's the same thing if you look at it a certain way—the same emotions, the same crazy rage. One night he can't stand it anymore. She's taunting him, carrying on with all those guys, and, with my luck, it had to be me she was doing it with that night. It finally gets to him, so he comes down filled with lust and hate to put an end to it, end the whole thing once and for all. Maybe he figures he'll just have it out with her, or maybe he knew what he was going to do. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference now whether he killed her in madness, or very coolly just to shut her up. In the end he picked up a pair of shears, went in there and ripped her apart. And there I was, the sap, the schmuck, lying asleep on the diving board, just lying there ready to take the rap. He kills her. He stabs her again and again and again. Then she cries out and I wake up and swim back to see what's going on, and then he blinds me with the flashli
ght, shoves me down, runs out, pauses for a moment—that moment when you saw him—then fades into the bushes and sneaks back around to the house. While I'm grasping around in there, slipping around in all that blood, he regains his composure, washes up, turns on the siren and the lights, and then comes back out playing his father-of-the-victim role just in time for everyone to see me stumbling out with those fucking shears."

  "That's not true." She'd finally found her voice. "That's not what happened," she screamed.

  "Isn't it? You saw him, didn't you?"

  "It wasn't him. I know it wasn't."

  "You're awfully sure."

  "Jared, this is crazy. You're getting off on something crazy here."

  "The way I remember it, it was dark. You blinked. You could barely see. You don't know who you saw."

  "You're coming on like Robinson now."

  "Yeah? Well, maybe Robinson was right."

  "What is this? I'm telling you it wasn't him."

  "I say it had to be."

  "It wasn't. I know it wasn't. Just like I know it wasn't you." She looked at him and saw he didn't believe her. Then he started rattling off more points.

  "Look, babe, you figured it out about the two of them. But you don't take it where it has to go. Like why? What happened? Why did he cut it off with her? Out of guilt maybe, or boredom, or, most likely, because he got tired of her, or maybe she just grew up too much and he likes them young and wasn't turned on anymore. I think she got to be a nuisance with all her pining around. I think she threatened him, told him she'd tell people what he'd done. He didn't have much choice after that. He had to get rid of her. And that's just what he did."

  "I'm not going to listen to this." She put her hands up to her ears.

  "You goddamn well are going to listen." He grabbed her wrists. "Your father's a cold bastard—you always told me that. She was threatening him, saying she'd ruin him if he didn't take her back, so he had to kill her if only to shut her up. Now he finds out through his goons over at Security that Suzie kept some sort of intimate sex diary. 'Jesus,' he thinks, 'got to get hold of that.' And then he figures that maybe you really found it, so he knows he's got to get it, destroy it, burn it up. That diary's hot stuff, really ruinous, like Nixon's tapes. He's got to be careful now. Got to be crafty and cool. So when you go out to Greenwich, and he knew you were going there to see your mom, his goons wait across the street for me to leave, then they bust in here and turn the place upside down. All right—they didn't find it. So tell me what happens now? Think about it. He's got to be worried. That fucking diary—it's still around, and he doesn't know what it says. He's gone this far, sent his goon squad in. The next step's pretty obvious it seems to me. He's got to find out what you know, and, well, if he thinks you know what happened, then you're as dangerous to him as Suzie ever was, and you know how he handled that."