by Greg Iles
“Is that what you’re doing now?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady. “Controlling Eve?”
“Yes.”
“Is Eve ever really Eve anymore?”
She bit her lip and turned her face away. “Sometimes.”
“What does she feel like when she is?”
“She’s afraid. She went to a doctor about it. He referred her to a psychiatrist, who put her on medication. That didn’t work, of course. Eve’s confused, and sometimes she breaks through when I least expect it. She’s a strong personality. Some people are easy to dominate. Others…it’s exhausting. I’m never quite myself-not completely-because part of my energy is always devoted to maintaining control of the person.”
Waters nodded as though it all made perfect sense, but there was a scream behind his lips.
Suddenly Eve turned back to him and squeezed his shoulder. “Johnny, what are you feeling?” She clung to him as though sensing he wanted to leave. “Tell me.”
As he searched for some innocuous lie, he suddenly realized that deception was ridiculous. He looked her in the eyes and took her hand. “Eve, are you ill? I want you to be completely honest with me. You said you were tested before. You didn’t tell me the result. Has someone made you sick?”
She pulled away, her eyes filled with hurt. “Do you really think I would do that to you? Put you at risk like that?”
“I don’t know. Think about everything you’ve just told me.”
“I know it sounds crazy. But think for a minute, Johnny. Millions of people go to church every Sunday and profess faith in their immortal souls. Christianity is built around that. Do those people believe what they say or not? Because if they do, they’re admitting that something exists apart from the body, some force. And if that’s true, then why is what I’ve described so crazy? Are you only your body, Johnny? If during the good times between us, I’d been paralyzed in a car wreck, would you have left me?”
She had clearly thought about this much more deeply than he had.
“You know you wouldn’t have. I know it. Well, this is like that. My old body is useless now, it’s gone. But I’m still here. And I need you.”
He sat up in the bed.
Eve got onto her knees and grasped his arm. “Are you leaving?”
He looked at his watch. “I need to.”
“Don’t go yet. Please. I don’t know how you feel. Where you are.”
“I don’t either.”
“Will you see me again?”
He looked toward the corridor. His clothes lay strewn on the antique rug outside the door. “I don’t know.”
Eve closed her eyes tight, as though suppressing panic. “Please don’t say that, Johnny. Please.”
Her reaction threw him back twenty years, to the worst times with Mallory. This yo-yo journey between present and past had been happening ever since the soccer field, and it left him dizzy, like a man trapped on a carnival ride. As soon as Eve opened her eyes, he would calm her down, then make his exit.
While he waited, she raised her right hand to her neck and twisted a lock of hair around her forefinger. Instead of releasing it, she pulled tighter and tighter, clearly hard enough to cause pain. With deep shock spreading through his chest, Waters reached across her body and took hold of her left wrist, exposing the inner forearm. Eve’s eyes popped open, but she did not release her hair. He scanned the length of the forearm but saw only smooth skin. Eve gave him an eerie smile.
The watch, he thought. She wore a large watch for a woman, a platinum Rolex. Before she could stop him, he grabbed the watch and yanked it two inches up her arm, keeping his fingers beneath the band to hold the arm still. Where the face of the watch had been, he saw four parallel scars in the skin. A cold wave of dread rolled through him. The scars were not fresh, but deep cuts had made them. Not just four, but cuts over cuts. Repetitive lacerations and scratches in the same place, a spot no one would see.
As Eve watched him with a mixture of shame and triumph, he jerked the covers off her nude body and looked at her legs. She didn’t try to hide. On her inner thighs, a few inches below her vulva, he found a crosshatched pattern of scars. Some were old, others made perhaps a week ago. He pulled the covers back up and sat motionless on the bed.
The scars were not evidence of suicide attempts, but part of a complex coping phenomenon of self-mutilation practiced by many adolescent girls. Mallory had cut herself in secret for much of her life, but Waters had been her lover for six months before he discovered this. At the time, he could find no information on the subject. Now he knew that self-mutilators inflicted pain on themselves to drown out a deeper pain, something inexpressible in any other way. Cutting was usually a later phase of the phenomenon. It often began as scratching, banging one’s head against the floor, or even hair-pulling. Mallory’s had begun that way, but even after she stumbled on cutting, she continued her hair-twisting as a public substitute for the bloody ritual that gave her relief in private.
“I didn’t want to show you that,” Eve said quietly.
Waters could not speak. The implications of the scars had shut down part of his nervous system. He simply could not process what he had seen. A man with any sense would run, but how could you escape from something in your head? Knowledge was inescapable, irrevocable. The sight of the scars had scrambled his sense of time, of history, of identity.
“Johnny?”
He turned and slid his legs off the bed. Before he could get up, Eve draped her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder. Her breasts compressed against his shoulder blades, and her voice sounded in his ear.
“Do you really have to go?”
“Yes.”
She licked the back of his neck, then slid her tongue up behind his ear. “Do you want to go?”
Her tongue entered his ear, then disappeared. Despite the insanity of the situation-or perhaps because of it-he felt himself stir again. She let go of him then, and backed away on the bed. Turning, he saw her kneeling three feet behind him, her eyes glowing with heat.
“Come here,” she said.
“I have to go.”
“No. You need me.”
Her body seemed to generate some sort of magnetic field. And though he tried not to see them, the small scars on her thighs seemed to blaze like fresh wounds. “I can’t do this.”
She reached out and took his hand, pulling until he lifted his legs back onto the bed. “Get like me,” she said, tugging his wrist.
He got up onto his knees.
She leaned forward and kissed him, lightly running her fingers across his chest, down his stomach. He felt himself swelling again.
“Eve-”
“Don’t say that,” she whispered, enfolding him in her hands.
“Don’t say what?”
She closed her eyes and squeezed him. “That name. I listen to it all day. Not from you…please.”
Suddenly she turned away, leaving him staring at her finely muscled back and the cleft of her behind. The sudden disappearance of her hands left him quivering with desire to be inside her.
“Remember?” she said to the wall.
His face felt hot. He could not move.
Eve slid backward, reaching for his hand as she neared him. “You know what I like.” She caught his hand and pulled his arm over her shoulder, then leaned into him. “And I know what you need.”
“Eve-”
“Shhh.” She threw herself forward, pulling him across her back as she went down on all fours. “You remember,” she said, her voice hoarse now. “Come on, Johnny.”
Sweat filmed his face, cold at the temples as she pressed back against him, leaving no doubt about where she wanted him.
“Are you sure?”
She turned and looked back at him, her eyes filled with dark knowledge, her lips curved in a serene smile. “I’m totally relaxed. Do it.”
He shut his eyes and obeyed.
It was dusk when he swung the Land Cruiser out of the narrow drive and onto
Wall Street. As he crossed to the next block, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw her black Lexus nose out of the drive, then pull into the street. He looked at his cell phone and thought of calling home, but decided against it. Rose would be gone by now. Lily and Annelise would be in the kitchen, talking about homework, wondering where Daddy was. Daddy was wondering the same thing.
His arms and legs felt shaky, as though he couldn’t trust them. Memories of his last hour with Eve flashed through his mind like flares in the darkness, blanking out his thoughts. She came back to him in pieces, like quick cuts in a film. The nape of her neck, beaded with pearls of sweat. Her hip, already bruised in the pattern of his fingertips. And the sounds…her mouth at his ear, whispering, urging, taunting, begging. Nonsense words. Profanity. Prayers. But always she returned to the same three words: a pleading command, a mantra, the soundtrack to her remarkable movement, her controlled abandon. “Say my name, Johnny….”
“Eve,” he’d grunted.
She shook her head and splayed her fingers against the wall to brace herself against him. “No. Say it.”
“Eve…”
“No! Say my name!
“I did.”
“Say it!” Anger now, as she thrust violently backward, using her well-muscled arms to anchor herself on the wall. “You know me now! You remember!”
He shook his head, unable to vocalize anything, though the word she wanted so desperately was swelling in his mouth like a balloon, bursting to be freed with all its transformative power.
“Say my name, damn it!” she screamed. A river of sweat ran down the valley created by the muscles on either side of her spine. His eyes tracked up her arm to the four scars her watch had concealed. “I can’t feel my head,” she panted. “Johnny? I can’t…say it…say my name!”
He never did.
Chapter 9
He saw Eve every day for the next two weeks. In the beginning he tried to resist, but it was pointless. The awareness that she was within a few miles of him yet not with him made it impossible to concentrate on the smallest things. His work did not suffer, because he did not work. When forced to be in his office, he stared out the window at the river or riffled through the portfolio he kept in the locked desk drawer.
Then his cell phone would chirp. He developed a Pavlovian reaction to the sound. Out of silence it came, and before the first chirp ended, his heartbeat had accelerated, his respiration had gone shallow, his self-awareness had tripled in intensity. Then Eve would speak, her voice a clipped command.
“Ten minutes.”
“I’m gone,” he’d reply, already standing with his keys in his hand. Eve always called from pay phones, and she always managed to be waiting for him when he arrived at their assignation.
In the beginning they used Bienville. Waters had suggested that they meet in various empty houses, as though Eve were showing him properties for sale, but she rightly argued that this would create more problems than it would solve. If she toured him around town in a sham of house-shopping, word would quickly get back to Lily that her husband was looking at antebellum homes, and she would wonder why, since they already owned one that she had no intention of selling. Moreover, few other properties had the advantages of Bienville. Though situated in the middle of town, the mansion was totally isolated by its elevation and its verdant gardens. The only risk of being seen came when either of them turned into the narrow gravel drive that led off of Wall Street. From that moment until they drove out again-usually hours later-they were safe from the prying eyes of passersby.
Waters came to know the mansion in a way he did not know his own, the way the child of a house knows its secret spaces and idiosyncrasies. They made love in every room, not by design but by serendipity. Exploring the house between sessions, they would find a cozy nook they hadn’t noticed before, or a bathroom countertop set at just the right height, and a different sort of exploration would begin. Sometimes they would look down at the street from the half-moon window on the third floor, watching the people passing below, oblivious to the naked lovers above. Their hands would intertwine, they would kiss, and the rest followed as naturally as flowers opening to the sun.
These were moments of searing purity to Waters, existential epiphanies that made irrelevant all that had come before and all that might come after. But this purity had nothing to do with morality, or even with light. There was more darkness in the house than light. Darkness within Eve, and also within himself. That darkness was the shadow of Mallory Candler, who haunted the empty mansion with them during these lost hours. When they made love, Mallory was always there, watching from beside the bed or from over Eve’s shoulder. The whole experience was a kind of shared madness, but Waters had lived without passion for so long that he would deny almost any insanity to drink of it. Before long, he found a way to think about it that he could live with. It was like dating an insatiable schizophrenic; the conversations could be eerie, but the sex was explosive.
It was in her sexuality that Eve most resembled Mallory. For just as Eve and Waters avoided dwelling on the underlying truth of their situation-riding the wave of passion without looking beneath the dark water that carried them forward-Mallory too had used sex as an escape. Even before the “black wings” that she later named broke loose in her head, Mallory fled into the sanctuary of physical ecstasy, struggling to drive back an amorphous threat that Waters felt but could not see. With Mallory, directness was the thing. Foreplay was exactly that, and she was not much interested in play. Sex was penetration; all else was secondary. Even now, he could see her near-mindless stare as she bucked and strained toward her peak, her renowned beauty shed like a husk as some primal thing took her over, the way a woman in childbirth is hijacked by larger forces, primordial compulsions that drive her through pain that a conscious body could not otherwise endure.
After Mallory’s deepest drives had been sated to some degree, she could spend hours exploring, caressing, and kissing-but all that was lagniappe. What had stuck in his mind was her aggressiveness. She was usually ready for him before they were alone, and she could not get her clothes off fast enough. Sometimes she didn’t bother to remove them; she wore skirts so that she could simply climb astride him in the car, or lift her leg in a fortuitous hallway or bathroom and take him into her standing up. She dared him to take her in crowded places, where discovery would have instantly shattered the perfect image grafted onto her by the town and then the state. She brought inanimate objects into their coupling, things Waters would never have thought of as sexual, and which frightened him for her when he did. The perversity of her needs-and her ruthless directness in seeking to satisfy them-kept him in a state of continuous arousal. He went through his days with a woman whom young and old alike admired and adored, whom many Mississippians thought of in the way they thought of the models for Ivory Snow, all the while knowing that her true nature was such that no one in their insular world could have imagined or believed it.
All this Eve Sumner resurrected in the empty mansion on Wall Street. Rather than analyze her behavior, Waters shut his mind and embraced it, reveling in her unrestrained eroticism. Eve gave orders; he obeyed them. He abased himself before her. He worshiped at the pagan altar of her sex. Only one heresy did he cling to in the shadows of this hidden world. When she demanded that he call her “Mallory,” that he give voice and thus legitimacy to the shadow that lived with them in the house, he refused. To do so, he sensed, would be to leap from the thin ledge of sanity where he now perched into the depths of madness.
The manifold dangers of their repeated trysts he saw but ignored. Blackmail was the most obvious risk, yet he no longer believed Eve intended anything of the sort. The fear of disease lingered until the day she casually left a copy of her blood tests on the piano, dated a week before their meeting at the soccer field. Being caught was always possible, and sometimes images of Lily’s face passed through his mind, how she would look if what was happening in the house on Wall Street were somehow revealed to her. Y
et it was Eve who insisted they adhere to strict rules of security: no calls between their homes; no actual conversations when she called his cell phone; no following each other; no “surprises” in the mall or the grocery store. Her preoccupation with these matters gave him a feeling that some dark purpose underlay all her actions, but to think too much about this might have broken the spell she had cast upon him, and he had no desire to do that.
Eve questioned him often about guilt. His feelings surprised her, and she seemed not to trust his honesty on this point. Ever since Lily lost the baby on the ultrasound table-and with it her passion-Waters had worked hard not to feel resentment about his wife’s inability to let go of that pain. But he was human, and eventually the thousand small humiliations he endured accreted into resentment. Lily’s emotionally detached efforts to relieve his frustration only made the problem worse, and as months-and then years-passed, he struggled to keep his resentment from twisting into something worse. He thought he had succeeded. But now, experiencing all that Lily had denied him, and that he had denied himself, he could not feel guilt. He knew he should feel it, yet he did not. What he was experiencing with Eve, he desperately needed. He had wanted that ecstasy with Lily, but it was simply beyond her power. Lily’s inmost self had been wrapped in chains to which Waters did not have the key.
When he was home, he walked through the house like a secret stranger, a double agent who believed his own cover. I am a husband, he would tell himself. A father. I love this woman. I love this child. And he did. Sitting with Annelise in the evenings, he would listen in wonder as she told him about her day, each experience a suspenseful drama seen through the stark lens of seven-year-old perception. When he kissed Ana good night, her smile warmed him in a way nothing else could. Yet even before he passed through the door leaving her room, images of Eve would rise into his mind, as impossible to ignore as a fever in the blood. The urge to telephone her was almost irresistible, but he remembered her proscriptions and forced himself to wait until the next day, when she would call his cell phone. One night, though, the fever overcame him. He went to a pay phone and called her home. Eve was furious until he explained where he was. She met him on a deserted county road and made love with him on the ground, her dark eyes reflecting the moonlight, her voice weaving its ceaseless spell in his ear as he grunted like an animal into the surrounding forest.
