Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire

by Paula Guran

  “What?”

  “I’m in love with Avery; he’s in love with me. But we can’t see each other much. I see him outside his house sometimes.”

  “What the fuck you talking about? Shut the fuck up.”

  VJ comes back scowling, gets into the car.

  “There ain’t shit in there but forty dollar.” He holds up the two twenties.

  “You check the account?” Reebok asks him.

  “Forty dollars.” He looks hard at Barbara. “You got another account?”

  “No. That’s all I have left. I got fired from my job a few months ago. You know how that is.”

  “The fuck.” He’s busy rooting through her purse.

  “Just dump it out,” she says. “It’s hard to find anything unless you dump it out.”

  He looks at her hard. He mutters something. Then he dumps it out on his lap. He finds the checkbook, checks it against the receipt from the ATM. Same account number. He doesn’t find any credit cards. No other bank cards.

  “You can look through my apartment,” she suggests. “It’s not too far away.” She looks at Reebok. “We might he more comfortable there. I have some cold pizza.”

  “Girl,” VJ says with a different, patient tone, as if talking to an idiot, “you been carjacked. Carjacked. We’re not eating your motherfucking pizza. We carjacking.”

  “We could sell my car for parts,” she suggests. “You could strip it.” “You got any jewelry at your house?”

  “You can look, but I haven’t got any, no, except junk. All I have is a cat. Some cold pizza. I could get some beer.”

  “The ho’s retarded,” Reebok says.

  “I think I’m the one doing the best thinking here,” Barbara points out. She spreads her hands and adds, “If you want to rape me, you should do it at my house, where it’s safe. If you want to strip the car we should go do that. But we shouldn’t stay here because it might call attention to us, just sitting in the parking lot.”

  VJ looks at Reebok. She can’t read the look.

  She decides it’s time to make the suggestion. “I do know where there’s money. Lots of it. It’s in a safe, but we can get it.”

  Avery knows it’s going to be a good one because his palms are clammy. He’s sensitive to things like that. He looks at the clock on his desk. Velma is going to be in here in five minutes, wearing the outfit he got for her in that shop in Los Angeles. His willy is already stirring against his thigh, with that sort of core sensation running through it, like a hot wire running back into his testicles, and his palms are clammy and the hair on the back of his neck is standing up—all from trying not to think about her coming through the door of his office with that outfit under her coat. She could he a bitch, and you could take that to the bank, but by God here was no one like her when it came to playing those little games that got his blood up. They had it down to, what, maybe twice a month now, and that was just about right. He was almost fifty, and he had to sort of apportion out his energy with this kind of thing. He needed that extra something to prime the pump and for a woman of forty five she sure could—

  The phone rings. “Beecham Real Estate,” Avery says into it.

  There’s a lady on the other end wants to know about his rental properties. Wonder what kind of underwear you got on, he says to her in his mind. Out loud he says, “I can ask Velma to show the place tomorrow morning. It’s a great little find . . . No, this afternoon might be kinda hard . . . “

  The woman goes on and on about her “needs.” Her rental needs. While he pretends to listen, Avery fantasizes about getting a line on some little cookie like this, a young one, giving her a house to live in at minimal rent in exchange for nookie once in a while. Trouble is, Velma goes over all the rental accounts. She’d notice the discrepancy. There’s always a snag and it’s always your hag. But Velma is okay. She likes games, likes to do it in the office, in broad daylight. Long as the shades are down.

  He remembers that girl in the Philippines when he was in the Navy. He shipped out two days after she said she was pregnant. Like that was an accident, her getting pregnant. But what a tail. That petite golden tail. And he remembers those paper lanterns she got from some Japanese sailor. The shifting colored light on the wall from those paper lanterns, swinging in the breeze coming through the mango tree while he worked that golden tail. Man.

  Beeping tone tells him he’s got another call coming in; he wriggles off the first call (love to answer your needs) and takes the second call, which is from his lawyer, the bloodsucking cocksucker. “What you going to charge me for this call, Heidekker?” Avery asks, looking out the window to see if Velma’s car’s in the parking lot. Don’t see it. That yellow Accord, whose car is that? He knows that car, doesn’t he?

  “No, I’m not charging you for this call,” Heidekker says. “Now listen—”

  “I’ve about had it with you sending me a bill every time you fart in an elevator with me, pal, I got to tell you.”

  “Look, I just need you to sign the request for an injunction because I’m gonna run it over to Judge Chang in about an hour here—”

  “Just scribble my fucking signature on it. Just get it done.” Goddamn it, now Heidekker’s got him thinking about Barbara, and of course his dick starts shriveling up. He tries not to think about Barbara, it shoots his nerves to hell, seeing her hang around his house, watching him in the parking lot—

  “I’m not empowered, you’re going to have to sign. If you want to give me power of attorney sometime, that might he a good idea and we could talk about that—”

  “No, forget it, forget it, just—” There, that was Velma’s Fiat pulling in. “Just don’t come over for half an hour or so. I won’t be in. So, this paper going to do it all?”

  “This injunction’s all-inclusive—she may not follow you, watch you, call you, the whole shebang. Can’t come within five hundred yards. There are laws about stalking now, and we can prosecute her if she tries anything cute. She’ll end up doing time. Which might do her good because they’d send her to a shrink. You change the locks at the office yet?”

  “No, that’s tomorrow morning. She might still have a key, if she copied it. Frank says I should be flattered. Hey, not by the attention I get from this girl, pal.”

  “Anyway, we’ll take care of it. I gotta go, Avery—”

  “Hold on now, hold on—” Keep him talking a minute, it went with the fantasy for Velma to interrupt a business call. “I gotta talk to you about this bill you sent me for last month, this is right on the edge of outrageous, here, Heidekker—”

  “Look, we can go over it item by item, but I’m going to have to charge you for the time it takes to do that—”

  The door opens. Velma’s taking up most of the door frame, unbuttoning her coat, her long red hair down over the white, freckled shoulders as she slips the coat away: freckles on the white, doughy titties cupped by the black lace corset, those thighs under the crotchless panties maybe a little heavy but when she’s wearing crotchless red lace panties who the fuck cares. Lot of makeup around her deep-set green eyes. Maybe she’s got some crowsfeet; maybe her butt’s beginning to sag. But with the corset holding it all together in black and red lace, with her pink labia winking out from the goldenred bush, who the fuck, who the fuck, who the fuck cares . . .

  “Get back to you later, Heidekker,” Avery says into the phone, hanging up.

  “I had to have it. I want that woodie in your pants, Av. I was touching myself and thinking about you and I had to have it, I couldn’t wait. I want it here and now,” she says in that husky voice she does. “Give me that big woodie.” She traces her cherry-red Revlon lips with the tip of her tongue.

  “It’s easy to misunderstand Avery,” Barbara’s saying. They’re in her car, in a corner of the parking lot of Avery’s building. “I mean, Avery’s so gruff. It’s really cute how gruff he is. I gave him a stuffed bear once, with a note, it said: ‘You’re just a big old bear!’ The way he talks is very short sometimes, and pretty b
lue, if you know what I mean, but he’s really very, very sweet and sometimes he—”

  “There any money in that place?” VJ interrupts, looking through the windshield at the little sienna-colored office building. Kind of place built in the early seventies, with those chunks of rocks on the roof, some insulation fad. “I think you frontin’, girl, I don’t think there’s shit in there.”

  At least, she thinks, I’ve graduated from ho to girl. “He keeps a lot of cash in his safe. I think he’s hiding it from the IRS. It was part of some payoff kind of thing for—”

  “How much?” Reebok interrupted.

  “Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred thousand dollars. It is quite a lot of money, isn’t it? I never really thought about it much before . . . ”

  “That place kind of rundown, don’t look like anybody in there doing that good.”

  “The recession killed two of the businesses that were there, and it’s a little place and Avery’s the only one left and he owns the building and he’s gonna renovate—he’s really just incredibly smart about those things, he always has these great plans for—”

  “Damn. Shut the fuck up about the man!” Reebok snarled. “Motherfucker!”

  “Fine, but just remember we can’t go in there shooting because I don’t want Avery to get hurt—”

  “Ho, what the fuck you talkin’ about—we step where we want, we got the motherfuckin’ guns—”

  “You need me. I know the combination to the safe.”

  Reebok goes tense in the backseat and shoves his gun at her. “And I know how to use this piece right here, you fuckin’ whitetail bitch!”

  “Then shoot me,” she says, shrugging, surprising herself again. But meaning it. She doesn’t care that much, really. Velma has Avery and nothing matters except Avery. That’s what people don’t understand. Avery belongs to her, and he is the cornerstone, and he is Man and she is Woman, and that’s that, and people should understand it. “I really don’t care that much,” she goes on. “Torture me. Kill me. I’m not going to do it unless we do it my way.”

  The muscles in VJ’s jaw bunch up. He points the gun at her face.

  She looks into VJ’s eyes. “Do it. Kill me. Throw away the money.”

  VJ looks at her for a full ten seconds. Then he lowers his gun and reaches into the back, and pushes Reebok’s gun down.

  Right on the desk. He was doing it to her right on the desk, and he was telling her he loved her. He had her legs spread, her bony knees in his big, rough hands, and he had his pants down around his ankles, and there were zits on her thighs, she was wearing some kind of hooker costume, and . . .

  He was telling her he loved her.

  Then Avery’s head snapped around to look at them, his mouth open and gasping with effort, his face mottled, forehead drippy, and he blinked at them. “She locked the office door . . . ” Kind of blurting it. Then he focused on Barbara and realized she must have copied the keys.

  Then—she can see it in his face—he realizes he’s standing there with his pants down and his penis in Velma, who’s propped on a desk with her legs spread, and two strange black guys are standing behind Barbara staring at him over her shoulder.

  “Jesus Christ Mary Mother of God” is what he says next as he pulls out his penis and grabs his pants, and Velma opens her eyes and sees Barbara and Reebok and VJ and screams.

  Velma scrambles off the desk, hunching down behind it. Avery hits the silent alarm button, but it doesn’t work; Barbara switched it off.

  When Barbara was a little girl in Florida, she witnessed a hurricane. She was staying at her granddad’s orange farm. Her grandma kept chickens, and Barbara looked through a knothole in the wall of the storm shelter and saw a chicken spreading its wings and being caught by the wind and the chicken was lifted into the sky and it disappeared up there, in the boiling air. Barbara feels now like there’s a big wind behind her, pushing her into the room, only the wind is inside her, and she does what it wants to do, and it’s carrying her around the room, like a tornado’s whirling, carrying her around and around the desk, and it’s howling out of her: “That’s how she traps you, Avery! That’s how she did it and she’s dressed like a hooker and that’s completely right because she is a whore, she’s a WHORE who’s trapped you with her cunt and she is an evil, evil WHORE!”

  Avery has his pants up and he is seeing Reebok and VJ come into the room and he is reaching into the desk drawer. Barbara is swept up to the desk by the wind feeling, and she slams the desk drawer on his hand. “No.”

  Avery yelps with hurt, and when she hears that, something just lets go inside Barbara; a spillway opens up in her and she thinks, I forgot what feeling good feels like. She hasn’t felt this good since she was little, before some things started happening to her.

  Now she finds herself drawn to the sound that Velma is making: Velma cursing under her breath as she hustles toward the side door to her office, thinking she’s going to get to a phone, call 911.

  Barbara looks VJ in the eye and says, “Don’t let her get away, she’s got the money. Shoot her in the legs.”

  VJ jerks out the gun—and hesitates. Velma’s got her hand on the doorknob.

  “Barbara, Jeezus Christ!” Avery yells, clutching his swelling hand to his stomach.

  “VJ,” Reebok says. “Shit. Just grab her.”

  “No, shoot her in the goddamn legs or we lose the money!” Barbara says, saying it big, the voice coming from her with that stormfront behind it.

  Then the thunder: the gun in VJ’s hand.

  Velma screams and Barbara feels another release of good feeling roll through her as pieces of Velma’s knees spatter the door and embed in the wall and blood gushes over the carpet. Avery bolts for the door and, feeling like a Greek goddess, Barbara points at him and commands Reebok, “Hurt that traitor with your gun! Hurt him! He’s stealing everything that’s ours! Stop him.”

  Reebok seems surprised when the gun in his hand goes off— maybe it was more a squeeze of fear in his fingers than a real decision to shoot—and a hole with little red petals on it like a small red daisy appears on Avery’s back, then another—

  Avery spins around, howling, mouth agape, eyes like those of a toddler terrified of a barking dog; Avery trying to fend off bullets with his pudgy fingers—she never saw before how pudgy they were—as Barbara reaches over and grabs Reebok’s hand and points the gun downward at Avery’s penis as his unfastened pants slip down. She pulls the trigger and the tip of his penis disappears—which she saw only that one other time, uncircumcised, with that funny little hose tip on it—and she shouts, “Now you’re circumcised, Avery, you traitor fucking that whore you pig!”

  Reebok and Avery scream at the same time almost the same way.

  Then she notices Velma sobbing. Barbara crosses the room to Velma, picking up something off the desk as she goes, not really consciously noticing what it is till she’s kneeling beside Velma, who’s trying to crawl away, and Barbara’s driving the paper spike into her neck, one of those spikes your kid makes for you in shop with a little wooden disk, still has some receipts on it getting all bloody as the nail goes ka-chunk into her neck three times, four times, and Avery is screaming louder and louder, so VJ turns to him and yells, “Shut the fuck up!” and makes the top of Avery’s head disappear at the same moment that Barbara drives the spike again into Velma kachunk-boom!, the nail going in right behind her ear, and Velma suddenly pees herself and stops flopping, right in mid-flop, she stops . . .

  “Oh, fuck,” Reebok is saying, sobbing as Barbara gets up, moving through a sort of sweet, warm haze as she goes to the corner of the room and points at the cabinet that has the safe hidden in it and says, “Forty-one, thirty-five, and . . . seven.”

  It’s not until she’s in the car, on the road, pulling onto the freeway entrance, that Barbara notices that she peed herself, too, just like Velma. That’s funny. She’s surprised that she doesn’t really care much. She’s been surprised at herself all day. It feels good, it’s like on O
prah with those women talking about doing things they never thought they could do, that people said they couldn’t do, and how good they felt.

  She has to change her skirt, though. She won’t chance stopping by her apartment, but she’ll send VJ into a Ross or someplace at that new mall out east of town, on the way—she’s made up her mind they’re going to Nevada, Mexico would be too obvious—and he can get some clothes for them with money from the safe, almost a hundred thousand dollars . . . They didn’t have to do discount now, they could go to Nordstrom’s.

  But there was the problem of Reebok. His blubbering. “You’d better quiet him down,” she tells VJ softly. “The police are there by now, from all the noise, and they’re going to put out an APB and they might have a description of the car from somebody, but I don’t think so because no one was around, but even if they don’t . . . ” She was aware that she was talking in a rambling, on-and-on way, like she was on diet pills, but it didn’t matter, you just had to get it out. You had to get it out eventually. “ . . . even if they don’t have a description, they’re going to be looking for anything suspicious, and with him sobbing and waving a gun around . . . ”

  “VJ,” Reebok says raspily, between gasping sobs, “look what this crazy bitch got us into . . . Look what she done.”

  “I got you into a hundred thousand dollars.” She shrugs. And passes a Ford Taurus. “But I don’t think he should get any of the money, VJ,” she says. “I had to do half the job for him, and he’s going to panic and squeal on us.” She likes using that verb from old movies, squeal. “I think you should drop him off somewhere then we can go to Nevada and buy a new car for you, VJ, and some new clothes, maybe get you a real gold chain instead of that fake one, and you can have the watch I got in my bag, the watch I got for Avery, and some girls if you want, I don’t care. Or you can have me. As much as you want. Then we have to think about some more money. I’ve been thinking about banks. I read an article about all the mistakes bank robbers make. How they don’t move around enough, and all kinds of other mistakes, and I think we could be smarter.”