by Kate Flora
“Even though our lovers were cruel,” he said, dropping a warm hand on my leg and curling his fingers around my thigh, “it’s hard not to miss the company.”
Wide-eyed, I agreed. “Tommy was rotten, but it’s sad that he’s gone.” Tommy was my hated stepmother’s ugly old cat, recently deceased. I had to look down at my lap to suppress a smile.
The minute our glasses were empty, I was suddenly tired and wanted to leave. I needed to get him back to my house before the drug kicked in. In the car, he surreptitiously snagged a camera from the pocket on the door.
***
Once or twice, close to my house, his driving got erratic enough so I put a helping hand on the wheel. When I invited him in, I thought he was going to blow the whole thing. “I’m feeling kind of tired,” he said. He hadn’t taken his hands off the wheel.
I rested my hand on his thigh, pulling in my elbows, letting the Wonderbra do its thing, and dropped my voice into a lower register. “I could make you some coffee,” I suggested. “Or get you a Coke. You know what we were saying about how empty a place can seem? And I really wanted to show you my paintings.” I was damned if I was going to get dressed up like some pathetic trollop and sit in a bad bar for two nights paying their absurd prices for drinks, only to let him get away. My job was to deliver Jay Hanrahan to the tender mercies of my book group, and deliver him I would.
I snuggled close as we went up the steps. In response, he wrapped an arm around me, his hand “accidentally” finding my breast. Stifling the impulse to slap him away, I fitted my key into the lock and opened the door.
“The living room is that way…” I said, turning on the small light on the foyer table.
He pulled some capsules from his pocket and asked for the washroom. “Yohimbe,” he said. “It helps me stay awake.”
Herbal Viagra. “Never heard of it,” I said. I must look even more vulnerable than I thought.
“You want that coffee? A Coke? A glass of wine?”
“Wine would be good.” He headed for the bathroom and I went to the kitchen.
There were five women sitting at the table. Callie, Tess, Suzan, and Georgia I expected. But Ellen was there, too. Three big pizza boxes were open on the counter. There was a pile of crumpled napkins. And five wineglasses.
“Hope you saved some for me,” I said. “I’m starving.”
“The hero didn’t spring for food?”
“The hero went straight for the horizontal.”
“You got the drug in his drink OK?” Suzan asked.
“I didn’t need to use the drug,” I said. “He drugged my drink. I just switched glasses when he wasn’t looking and the big fool drugged himself. Bartender’s in on it, too.”
She shifted the pizza boxes and held up a package. “In here I have got a dildo as big as the Ritz. When we’re done with him, that asshole will never be the same again.”
Tess exploded with laughter, catching the spraying wine with her napkins. “Oh, man, Suzan. That’s good.”
While the others were high-fiving, I said, “It seems to be kicking in awfully fast. He says he’s feeling tired and his driving was very erratic.”
“Well,” Georgia said. “Unless he’s dead or dying, we’re going through with this.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “If that man was teetering on the edge of a bridge, I’d give him a push. But we brought him here to teach him a lesson, right? One he’d remember? Well, the way he looks I’m just hoping he stays focused enough to learn that lesson.”
“I’m not letting that stop me,” Suzan said. “For all we know, all his victims felt sick and he just went ahead and screwed them.”
“We do know that,” Ellen said.
They were really psyched for this. Even Ellen looked better. “He just went to the bathroom to take this stuff…yohimbe…that stuff they call herbal Viagra…and get ready for his good time.”
Callie reached around behind her and got a big brown paper grocery bag. “Then let’s get ready, ladies. You go ahead and get Lothario in there warmed up, Rory. We’ll be right behind you.”
“Oh, boy,” Tess said, “I’ve really been looking forward to this.”
I turned to Ellen. “What are you doing here?” Then to the others. “Weren’t we trying to keep her out of this?”
“It’s not their fault, Rory. I invited myself,” Ellen said. “I think I have a right to be here.”
More than the rest of us, I supposed. I shrugged. “You do. I just think you’re taking an even bigger risk than the rest of us.”
But, as she often told me, I wasn’t her mother. I looked at my friends. At the pizza and wine and salad. At their eager faces in my bright kitchen, ready to have a lot of fun on our girl’s night out. I thought how utterly insane this was.
Suzan dumped the dildo from the box and hefted it. It was bright pink and scarily big. “Come on, ladies. Let’s go have some fun. And just to show that I am entirely humane…” She dug around in the bag and pulled out Astroglide. Tess had an offering of her own—a genuine Japanese-import Hello Kitty dildo.
***
It’s good to do things as a team, because there are things I’d never think of—like the Astroglide, a product obviously named by a man. I wondered if it was some offshoot of the space program? And Callie was on the case, efficiently handing out lab coats and examination gloves. As we entered the living room, I heard giggles behind me. Turning, I saw that they were all wearing masks. Jay Hanrahan was about to have an unusual sexual experience courtesy of Hillary Clinton, Marilyn Monroe, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Betty Ford. Queen Elizabeth was carrying the camera.
Hanrahan seemed to have recovered. He lay on my couch, shirt unbuttoned and shoes off, looking ready for an evening of predatory lust. The bulge in his pants suggested the yohimbe was working fast.
“I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “I invited a few of my friends over to share the fun.”
He stared over my shoulder at the parade of distinguished ladies, and the lust fell off his face like a false smile. “Oh, Jesus. Oh God. What the hell is this? What do you want? What’s going on?” His fingers scrabbled at the buttons on his shirt as one foot flopped around the floor, searching for a shoe. “I am not feeling well,” he said. “I think I’d better go home.”
“I’ll bet there are a lot of women out there who can relate to that statement,” Betty Ford said. “Who took one bleary, woozy look at you, grasped a corner of what you were planning to do, and said they’d like to go home. Am I right?”
“What the fuck!” He grasped for volume as he struggled for control, some mastery of the situation. Pushing himself to a sitting position, he planted his feet on the floor and tried to rise on rubber legs. His eyes looked as glazed as Ellen said hers had been. A swoony victim of his own date rape drug.
“Oh, let us help you,” Marilyn crooned, taking his arm. “Are you not feeling well? You need to get out of those tight old clothes and lie down.”
“And since we hear you’re just the guy for a power fuck,” Hillary said, seizing his other arm, “I am definitely your dream girl.”
“You’re all a fucking nightmare,” he said, trying to shove them away. “Leave me alone. I’m going.”
He was the rabbit batting at the fox. His legs skimmed the floor like a cartoon character as the Hollywood icon and the former first ladies led him into my guest room. Someone—good planning again—had spread a shower curtain over the mattress. Despite his incapacity, we could all see comprehension dawning. Would the drug take that away, leaving him with no memory of the assault? I guessed that was what the camera was for.
Being undressed by Queen Elizabeth is probably a fantasy few men entertain. In short order, we had him out of his clothes and down on the bed. Hillary Clinton produced restraints and our serial rapist, still cursing and threatening, was ready for a dose of his own medicine. We decided to begin by letting him enjoy the oral pleasures of Hello Kitty, shoving the bizarre thing between his resisting lips as Marilyn cooed,
“Come on, baby, open up. You know you want it.”
“Hold his nose,” said the queen. “He’ll have to open his mouth to breathe.”
Watching Hanrahan’s gleaming white teeth parted to admit a kinky Japanese sex toy was so funny Eleanor Roosevelt got a bad case of the giggles.
Then Her Majesty produced a set of nontoxic sex-play paints, and we decorated Attorney Hanrahan in a variety of pretty pinks and purples. Pink nipples with red bull’s-eye circles around them. A bobbling bright purple cock atop a pair of saggy sky blue balls.
“Oh,” Hillary said, flicking his dick, “aren’t blue balls just the saddest thing?” When she pulled a pair of shiny kitchen shears from the pocket of her lab coat, Hanrahan gave a genuinely girlish shriek.
“Let’s turn him over. It’s time to get to work. You got any duct tape, honey?” she asked.
“Yeah,” the queen said. “He’s not exactly with the program. It’s time for him to lie back and think about the British Empire.”
Betty Ford hooted and put a hand to her mouth as Eleanor Roosevelt brandished the massive pink dildo and the movie star and the other first lady and the queen flipped him over. “Open wide,” she said, slapping him on the rump. “This will only hurt for a minute.”
It didn’t hurt at all. Just seeing that monster dildo did the trick. Hanrahan squealed like a stuck pig and fainted like a fragile flower.
***
I love my book group. Sometimes we talk about Proust. Sometimes we read nonfiction or other classics that we’ve missed. We always enjoy each other’s company. It’s a great way to stay in touch.
We’ve been through grad school, a couple of nasty breakups, my excruciating divorce from an initially sweet husband who turned out to be controlling and insane and once tried to kill me because his voices told him I was evil. We’ve been through the loss of Ellen’s husband and the birth of Suzan’s baby. We’re as close as a group of women can be. We would need all of that strength and closeness to get through this.
Jay Hanrahan was dead. Not because of anything we’d done. We hadn’t beaten him or terrified him into cardiac arrest. He hadn’t choked on his own vomit because we stifled his complaints with duct tape. Callie thought he’d died from an unfortunate combination of yohimbe and a date rape drug. In his eagerness to get the maximum benefit from drugging me, he had taken an overdose of yohimbe, apparently an easy thing to do. It had interacted badly with his own date rape drug and sent him into cardiac arrest.
But we had committed a few crimes ourselves tonight, and now, at 1:00 a.m., I stood with three former first ladies and a Hollywood icon in my pretty guest room staring at the already graying body of the serial rapist sprawled on the bed.
“We’ve got to clean him up, get him dressed, take him home, and leave him in his own bed,” I said. “I’ll need one of you to help. We just have to pray for a building with no doorman or security cameras. Ellen, you stay here and make sure that every trace of him is gone. Tess, you follow me so you can help me get him inside and drive me home. The rest of you—go home. You were in all evening. We haven’t seen each other since book group. No one talks about this on the phone or by e-mail. Not one word.”
***
We parked his car under his building—luckily Ellen had remembered that much of her evening—and took him up in the elevator, our arms wrapped around him like two women who couldn’t wait to get the guy upstairs for a good time. Just in case there were cameras in the elevator, we talked to him, nuzzled him. Giggled. We didn’t see a soul and the whole place was as still as—well, as still as death.
My heart’s thump was loud enough to wake the building. I was glad to have Tess there. She was as cool as ice. Coolly tucking the covers up to his chin and smoothing the sheets. Coolly rolling his socks up and putting them in his shoes. Coolly putting his shirt in the pile in the closet to go to the laundry. Coolly brushing any residual hairs off his jacket and slacks and wiping our prints from the doorknobs.
We both wanted to search his place for pictures of his victims, thinking he might have brought them back now that the trial was over. We didn’t dare take the time.
A few blocks from his house, Tess suddenly pulled over to the curb, put her hands to her head, and started screaming.
***
I was painting pale peach roses, a peach so pale there was only a breath of color. A small picture for Suzan’s daughter’s bedroom. Her daughter was named Aurora after me, and I’d been meaning to do this picture for months.
I had Palestrina playing, soothed and succored by the moving combination of peace and inspiration in those lovely voices. For the first time since Ellen had called, her speech broken and shaking, to report the incident with Jay Hanrahan, the world felt good. Orderly. Not tinged with gray around the edges. I felt as though I could take full breaths without a catch, without that constant pit of anxiety that I’d been living with.
Cliché or not, the expression that fit was “today is the first day of the rest of my life.” Not that every day wasn’t. But today felt clear, like a weight had been lifted off my life. I must be a horrible person, because Jay Hanrahan was dead and I felt good.
Then, at 4:00 in the afternoon, just as I was struggling to get deeper apricot shading on the underside of a petal, someone rang the bell and then pounded on the door. My heart jumped and for a crazy moment, I imagined opening it to find Jay Hanrahan on my doorstep.
Carrying my brush, I went to answer it.
A tall, stern-looking policeman, badge shiny and belt weighted with equipment, stood on my steps.
“Aurora Dillon?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like you to come down to the station with me, ma’am. Chief wants to see you.”
I tried to keep worry off my face and breathe normally, even as panic flooded through me. “Can you tell me what this is about?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, ma’am. I was just told to bring you down to the station.” He didn’t say it was urgent, but the way he shifted restlessly from foot to foot said it for him.
“I just need to finish this petal, then I’ll drive myself down.”
“Sorry, ma’am. Chief said I was to bring you.” He’d paused to answer and now resumed his metronomic shifting.
I looked at the paintbrush in my hand. The perfect color. Thought of the unfinished painting. Kissed my incredible feeling of lightness good-bye. “I’ll get my shoes.”
***
It’s a power thing, I suppose. That’s why they make you hurry, then keep you waiting. Never mind the drying paint and stifled creativity, years were peeling off my life like calendar pages in an old movie. When the police call, if you’re a good citizen and not a bad guy, you show up.
It felt like I had a lead ingot in my stomach. Lead in my gut and whirling in my brain, wondering whether I should have gotten some advice from Georgia last night. What would they ask and what would I say? How had they found me? What did they know? Was Tess here, too, sitting in another room, asking herself the same questions? Would she stick to the script? I wished I knew as I sat in a room no bigger than a closet, with only a table and one other chair for company. No color, no pictures, no texture. Nothing to look at. Must be hell for some people. I was fine. I didn’t need the outside world to entertain me. I could look at those walls and project my own pictures..
The officer who’d delivered me here had asked if I wanted anything. Water? Coffee? A soft drink? I hadn’t wanted any of those. There was nothing worse than waiting or being interviewed when you had to pee.
When I went to get my shoes, I thought about calling Georgia, but we’d agreed—no cell phones. Cell phone calls can be traced. The time, the recipient, the caller’s location. If they didn’t know about the others, I wasn’t about to tell them. I’d willingly gotten myself into this and I would tough it out, whatever that meant. Right now, it meant waiting. I was infinitely patient with my work, with however long it took to get a picture right, however many tries. I was fine with the blank walls.
But I was horrible in situations where someone wanted to waste my time. Then I could feel time sliding like silk through my fingers, twining around them teasingly as it escaped. It was particularly hateful at this point, when I was so tantalizingly close to finishing a picture. Where the paint would dry and I’d have to re-create that color again.
When I’d been here before, they hadn’t kept me waiting.
If only I’d brought my own car. I could go home. Tell them to call me when I was ready and I’d come back. Could a person really do that? Just walk out of the station when summoned by the chief? What was wrong with these people? That cop had made it seem urgent, and now nothing was happening. I hated game playing. I hated liars. I liked dealing straight up. I was about to be a liar. I already was one. Taking Hanrahan home last night had been the big lie. One I could never come clean about.
Breathe, Rory, breathe, I told myself. I knew the chief well enough to know the game that was being played here. I’d seen it played to good effect. They wanted to make me anxious. I mustn’t let them. Breathe. My heart was jumping like a trapped frog. The ingot kept getting heavier. Those silky skeins of time kept sliding. Sliding. If I didn’t stop this, I’d be a hopeless mess by the time the chief got around to me.
I folded one leg up under me and thought about little Aurora’s picture. On the surface, it was a simple picture of roses, delicate, pale peach roses in an opalescent vase, sitting on a shiny wood table. That would have been hard enough, getting the luminescence of the vase, the sheen of the table, the complexity of colors of the opening roses. But what I was trying to put into the layers of opening petals was possibility. The infinite opportunities for enrichment and beauty that lay ahead for Suzan’s child. I was painting hope and mystery, life’s amazing unfolding, its beauty and its fragility. If I could get it right, the picture would hold that special love women have for their dear friends’ daughters, the hope that goes forward to the next generation.
