Man of Wax (Man of Wax Trilogy)

by Robert Swartwood

  “I want to speak to my wife and daughter.”

  “If you care anything for your wife and daughter, you’ll stop being a pussy and go fuck this woman. I don’t even know why you’re fighting me on this. You’ve seen all the different ways they do it on those websites. You have your own fetishes, the little things you always wanted to mention to Jennifer but always failed to in the end. Now here’s your chance.”

  At the other end of the bar heads began to turn again and a moment later I saw Juliet emerge from the restrooms, headed directly my way. Her eyes were on me as she walked, that seductive smile on her face. She was just a girl, only twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, and even though I was just thirty-two I kept telling myself this was wrong. I thought of Casey and reminded myself that Juliet was somebody else’s daughter, just another little girl who’d once thought herself a princess before the dark reality of the world came crashing down all around her and she began to sell her body for sex.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked, doing everything in my power to make my voice as calm and collected as possible, while inside I wanted to tear myself apart, I wanted to breakdown and cry right here in front of everyone.

  Simon said, “Goodbye, Ben.”

  There was a click and he was gone, and then the music and the talking and shouting of the bar enveloped me once more.

  I set the phone on the bar and glanced up to see the barman walking toward me. I handed him the phone, wanting to say thank you while at the same time wanting to spit in his face. Instead, just before Juliet returned to her stool, I heard myself asking him for two shots of Southern Comfort.

  “For you and the lady?” he asked, already reaching behind him for two small tumblers resting upside down on a towel. There was no reaction when he said lady, no disapproval or resentment at all in his eyes or face, which maybe meant he was used to men coming in here looking to hire pussy.

  I shook my head, thinking of Jen, thinking of Casey, thinking of being with them just yesterday. I tried remembering everything we’d done together, everything we’d talked about, but it was all coming up blank.

  “No,” I said, ignoring Juliet as she climbed up onto the stool next to me, leaned over and kissed me again on the cheek. This time, out of nowhere, her hand touched my inner thigh and didn’t leave. “Just for me.” I threw three of the twenties down on the bar. “And keep them coming.”

  21

  I don’t want to think about what the rest of the night consisted of, what happened after several hours passed and Juliet asked if I was ready to go. We ended up going to some place, what may have been a motel or apartment or something, I can’t even remember because by that point I’d been smashed.

  She led me into the room and sat down on the bed, where she started undressing. I went immediately for the bathroom, where I fell beside the toilet to throw up. Nothing came. I just dry-heaved for the longest time, got up, looked at myself in the mirror and didn’t recognize the man who stared back. Finally I washed my mouth, wiped my face, and stepped outside.

  Juliet had taken off her nylons, had stripped off her top and skirt, and just lay there in her black bra and panties. And heels.

  Christ, I remember thinking. She still has on the heels.

  Shaking my head, I turned away, went for the door, opened it.

  The man from earlier was standing there, the man who had impersonated a cop. He was standing off to the side so I couldn’t see him full on, reaching out and holding me in place with a meaty, powerful hand.

  I looked at him. He looked at me. He shook his head and pushed me back into the room and shut the door behind me. I turned back around to find Juliet still on the bed, now with her hand down her panties, pleasuring herself.

  • • •

  OKAY, THAT’S ENOUGH. Simon forced me to do what I ended up doing, but he can’t force me to relate the events, so I won’t. I’ve tried so hard keeping it from my mind—that terrible act of forced adultery—and I want to keep it gone. Besides, just as I’d soon learn, all of it was being broadcasted over the Internet anyway. Everything I did with that girl is out there somewhere. And even though I didn’t know this at the time, I still thought about those two men who’d jumped me, what one of them told me before the shooting started; I thought about everything Simon had said he knew about me spending time on the Internet, and I felt like one of those girls. Why, I’m still not even sure, because Juliet should have been the one to feel like that instead. To feel like an object, just a simple means to an end. But no, for some reason I felt that way, and it made what I ended up doing to her feel even worse.

  • • •

  EVENTUALLY I FOUND myself in a taxi, headed back to the Grand Sierra Resort. The city was lit up all around me but I barely noticed. I was in a daze, even more so than before when Juliet first walked into the Sundown Saloon and forced all those heads to turn. I was still feeling drunk but I kept thinking about everything I’d just done. I thought about Jen, about Casey, and I hoped wherever they were, they were safe.

  When the driver dropped me off at the hotel, I gave him all the money I had left. I don’t know how much that was. I’d spent all my money at the bar and was using some money Juliet had given me as I left, the girl saying that she’d been paid more than enough.

  I wandered through the lobby toward the elevators but stopped when Jason called my name. He still stood behind the front desk, on the phone again, the mouthpiece against his shoulder to keep it muted. In his free hand was a small cardboard box.

  With the worst dread I had ever felt, I approached the front desk.

  “The package you mentioned before,” Jason said. “It was delivered a few hours ago by courier.”

  He held the package out to me but I refused to take it.

  “Sir?” There was sincere worry in his voice. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded and took the package and hurried away toward the elevators.

  A minute later I was on the seventh floor, inside my room. It felt much colder than before, just like in room six at the Paradise Motel. I sat down on the bed and held the small cardboard box in my hands. Like before, if I wanted to open it, I’d have to use my nails because I had no knife or scissors or key. And like before, I didn’t want to open it.

  But I knew I had no choice.

  And I remembered I did have a key—the Dodge’s, resting right on top of the TV along with the black and white glossy photograph of Jen and Casey bound and gagged. I opened the box and let the Styrofoam peanuts fall all over the place. I pulled out what was inside.

  I dropped it at once.

  It was a finger. A human finger. Delicate and slight, it still had something attached to it at the end, right near where it had been cut off from its hand. Something that matched the thing that hadn’t been on my finger when I woke up this morning, in the middle of what could only be called hell.

  A wedding ring.

  My wife’s wedding ring.

  Part Two

  NO OUTLET

  22

  Meeting the woman who would become my wife was just one of those auspicious events that make us believe the world may not be a completely random and chaotic mess after all. She was a friend of a friend; I was a friend of a friend. There had been other girls there, girls who’d acted stuck up and refused to introduce themselves to me, to instead have Clive Goldman—one of my closest friends from high school, who’d invited me out to visit the spring after I dropped out of college—or one of their friends do the introductions. They were good-looking and, below their well-manicured façades, nice and a few could even have been called sweet. Clive had even told me which girls were the easiest to talk to and who were just the easiest, and while normally I would have taken his advice to heart, this time I didn’t.

  This time my eye was on one girl in particular.

  Her name was Jennifer Abele and from what I understood she didn’t go to DePaul like Clive but someplace else, some Ivy League school. She came from an extremely rich family, her father being an
important figure in the city of Chicago. We met briefly one day and I’d been perplexed, just staring at her because she was so beautiful and I knew it was one of those things where I was bound to wake up any moment, because occurrences like these just don’t happen, or else are so completely rare that they might as well not happen. I’d say it was love at first sight, but that would not only be cliché, it would be wrong, because there really is no such thing when you think about it. Still something had been there, something that caused us two days later to start talking. A group of us had decided to walk the city and went down to the Lincoln Park Zoo. I’d been meaning to go up to her but kept losing my nerve until eventually it was she who made the first move, Jennifer Abele, daughter of the renowned Howard Abele who would someday offer me half a million dollars to break up with his daughter and turn my back on her forever.

  “I don’t know about you,” she said, coming up to stand beside me, “but I’m not a big fan of elephant shit. I mean, it just reeks, don’t you think?”

  At first I didn’t even think she was talking to me. Then I looked over, saw her staring back at me, trying to keep a straight face, and I just burst out laughing.

  “I know we were introduced before,” she said, “but I’m Jen.” She extended her hand and I shook it, not being able to find my voice for the longest time. Then finally it came, and I said, “I’m Ben,” and that was how it started, how we began talking. But it wasn’t like there were any instant fireworks. Far from it. As it turned out she had a fiancée, a guy named Jeremy she’d dated since high school and who now attended Yale. She was getting married in the fall, would probably get pregnant and have to settle down, which would play hell on her career, because she wanted to be a lawyer. No way, I told her, I want to be a lawyer too—but then caught myself a few seconds too late, when she asked me if that was true. Well no, I had to admit, the defeat apparent in my voice, I had wanted to be a lawyer. Oh really? she asked. What happened to change my mind?

  But of course I didn’t tell her. That would come years later, about a year after I learned her little dark secret, feeling as if I owed it to her ... though, to be honest, I never did tell her the whole truth.

  By the time the week of my visit was up Jen and I had grown a strong rapport. The woman I’d first thought was an angel would turn out to be nothing more than a friend, and a long distant friend at that, because on the last day we exchanged email addresses, Jen telling me to stay in touch, and while I had hope, I also knew she was just being nice. Still, on the long drive back home, she was all I thought about.

  I tried forgetting her, shoving the scrap of paper she’d written her email address on in the bottom of my desk with no intention of contacting her, but she emailed me that first week. We stayed in touch, talking about random things, until one day months later the phone rang. My mom answered and she called for me, and I took it in my bedroom, expecting one of only a few friends from high school I still kept in contact with. It had been none of them, had instead been Jen, who was in tears, who had just found out her fiancée had cheated on her, had in fact been cheating on her, and she wanted to get away, just wanted to leave Chicago, and could she come visit me in Pennsylvania?

  I almost told her no. I don’t know why, but for some reason I thought I was dreaming and that I might as well not allow this dream to continue any longer, because eventually I would wake up and realize just how pathetic my life really was, and to tell her no now would at least keep the majority of my pathetic existence at bay.

  “Yes,” I said, sitting on the edge of my bed, “of course you can.”

  She flew out a few days later and stayed at a Holiday Inn (which was no doubt the first Holiday Inn she’d ever stayed in). I took time off work, taking her down to Philly, down to Baltimore, up to Harrisburg. Hershey Park would be closing in a month and we spent a day there too. Things felt just as they had back in Chicago, like we had been friends since we were born, and that friends was all we were ever going to be. Then, just two days before she was supposed to leave, I couldn’t stand it anymore and found myself leaning in to kiss her. We were leaving the mall, walking through the parking lot, and I’d just unlocked her door. I tried to stop but had apparently lost all control over my body and continued, sealing the deal and ensuring our friendship would not continue from this moment onward.

  But the strangest thing happened: she kissed me back, and like that, the world began to have meaning again.

  The kiss, while deep, didn’t last long, and when we both pulled away she peered up at me and smiled.

  “I was wondering how long I was going to have to wait for that.”

  Long distance relationships, as a rule of thumb, almost never work out (this was the reason why my girlfriend the last two years of high school, Marissa, broke my heart just days after we graduated). Somehow ours did. Jen had to finish school, then had to go to law school, because her life’s dream was to become a lawyer. The fact that we were together and that I was a painter and would always be a painter, no matter what happened, never bothered Jen in the slightest. Which, as my dad told me one night, right after he’d been put in the hospital because of his angina, meant Jen was one special lady and I would be an idiot to think otherwise.

  I met her father only three times, the first on one of my few visits to Chicago, when Jen brought me over to the mansion she’d grown up in.

  Howard Abele was always a busy man, so much so he barely glanced at me when Jen introduced us. He was short and slim, wore glasses and had his hair combed to the side; he had a beak nose and piercing eyes and seemed to have been born in a suit. He didn’t shake my hand and hurried past, saying he was late for a meeting.

  The second time came three years later when I approached him to ask for his permission to marry his daughter. He’d simply shaken his head and said no, walked away without a glance back. I had stood there stunned, speechless, unsure what to do next, but then Jen’s mother came to the rescue. She told me of course I had permission to marry her daughter; as long as I made Jenny happy, then she didn’t care what we did.

  Unfortunately Claire Abele never attended our wedding, which was in Pennsylvania. She was killed in a hit-and-run only a few months later. I’d gone with Jen to the funeral, which was the third place I saw her father, and which afterward he’d taken me aside and handed me the check for five hundred thousand dollars. It was more money than I would ever see at one time in my entire life. More money than my parents would ever hope to earn even if they worked every day of their lives and saved every dollar and penny. I briefly thought about all the debts my parents had, about all the debts I had, and how even a tenth of this check would help improve things. Then, with these thoughts running tandem in my mind, I ripped the check up right in front of him. For some reason I hadn’t wanted to tell Jen, but she’d gotten it out of me sensing I was holding something back, and from that day forward she cut off all ties with her dad. Refused to speak to him again. Suffice it to say on our wedding day, her side of the chapel was quite sparse, so our guests had been encouraged to sit wherever they pleased.

  • • •

  I’M NOT SURE what else I want to say about Jen. Obviously I could go on forever, and that doesn’t even include the three and a half years after Casey was born and our family really became complete.

  But there, speaking of completeness, I should mention about the night, only a month before we got married, where Jen and I were lying in bed and I said something about us being soul mates. I don’t know what we were talking about but I said the words and immediately felt stupid, thinking they were beyond cheesy.

  “Soul mates don’t exist,” she whispered. We were spooning, my arm around her, holding her close.

  I said, “Oh,” a little more than just disappointed (wanting to kick myself, really), and she had turned over so we could stare at each other. Around the room were a half dozen scented candles, and in the soft light I stared at the curve of her face, her dimples, the slight birthmark just beneath her chin.

&nbs
p; She said, “Don’t say it like that. We’re so much more than soul mates.”

  And then in the dark and quiet of our apartment bedroom, Jen told me the story of Plato’s Symposium, which was a recreation of a discussion among Greek philosophers concerning love. One of the philosophers there, Aristophanes, said that originally there weren’t two sexes, but three. That at the beginning of time there had been men, women, and beings of both man and woman, an androgynous sex. All of these creatures were round, with four hands and four legs and two faces on opposite sides of one head. They were strong and mighty, and it was said they dared to challenge the gods. Naturally Zeus wasn’t too pleased about this, and he came up with a plan to stop these creatures. He decided he would allow them to exist, but would weaken their power by cutting them all in half. When he did this the male creatures he cut apart became homosexuals, who pursued other males. The same with the female creatures. But the androgynous sex was split up so one half was male and the other half female, and pursued each other. So, according to the myth, we search the world for our other half, so when we find each other we can become whole again.

  “But isn’t that just like soul mates?” I asked, once she was done speaking. I loved listening to her talk, the soft lilt of her voice, the way she always knew which words to speak and in which order to say them. It was what made her such a great lawyer, because it never took her long to formulate her argument, and to stick by it no matter what.

  “Maybe,” she whispered. She leaned forward and lightly kissed me on the lips; I could taste the lip-gloss she’d applied earlier, still present after our lovemaking. “Either way you’re my other half.”