Getting Off: A Novel of Sex & Violence Read online

  “Maybe,” she said, when the embrace ended, “maybe we should have one more drink after all.”

  She was dreaming, something confused and confusing, and then her eyes snapped open. For a moment she did not know where she was, and then she realized she was in New York, and realized the dream had been a recollection or reinvention of her childhood in Hawley.

  In New York, and in Jim’s apartment.

  And in his bed. She turned, saw him lying motionless beside her, and slipped out from under the covers, moving with instinctive caution. She walked quietly out of the bedroom, found the bathroom. She used the toilet, peeked behind the shower curtain. The tub was surprisingly clean for a bachelor’s apartment, and looked inviting. She didn’t feel soiled, not exactly that, but something close. Stale, she decided. Stale, and very much in need of freshening.

  She ran the shower, adjusted the temperature, stepped under the spray.

  She hadn’t intended to stay over, had fallen asleep in spite of her intentions. Rohypnol, she thought. Roofies, the date-rape drug. Puts you to sleep, or the closest thing to it, and leaves you with no memory of what happened to you.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe she’d gotten a contact high.

  She stepped out of the tub, toweled herself dry, and returned to the bedroom for her clothes. He hadn’t moved in her absence and lay on his back beneath the covers.

  She got dressed, checked herself in the mirror, found her purse, put on lipstick but no makeup, and was satisfied with the results. Then, after another reflexive glance at the bed, she began searching the apartment.

  His wallet, in the gray slacks he’d tossed over the back of a chair, held almost three hundred dollars in cash. She took that but left the credit cards and everything else. She found just over a thousand dollars in his sock drawer, and took it, but left the mayonnaise jar full of loose change. She checked the refrigerator, and the set of brushed aluminum containers on the kitchen counter, but the fridge held nothing but food and drink, and one container held tea bags while the other two were empty.

  That was probably it, she decided. She could search more thoroughly, but she’d only be wasting her time.

  And she really ought to get out of here.

  But first she had to go back to the bedroom. Had to stand at the side of the bed and look down at him. Jim, he’d called himself. James John O’Rourke, according to the cards in his wallet. Forty-seven years old. Old enough to be her father, in point of fact, although the man in Hawley who’d sired her was his senior by eight or nine years.

  He hadn’t moved.

  Rohypnol, she thought. The love pill.

  “Maybe,” she had said, “we should have one more drink after all.”

  I’ll have what you’re having, she’d told him, and it was child’s play to add the drug to her own drink, then switch glasses with him. Her only concern after that had been that he might pass out before he got his clothes off, but no, they kissed and petted and found their way to his bed, and got out of their clothes and into each other’s arms, and it was all very nice, actually, until he yawned and his muscles went slack and he lay limp in her arms.

  She arranged him on him on his back and watched him sleep. Then she touched and stroked him, eliciting a response without waking the sleeping giant. Rohypnol, the wonder drug, facilitating date rape for either sex. She took him in her mouth, she mounted him, she rode him. Her orgasm was intense, and it was hers alone. He didn’t share it, and when she dismounted his penis softened and lay upon his thigh.

  In Hawley her father took to coming into her room at night. “Kitten? Are you sleeping?” If she answered, he’d kiss her on the forehead and tell her to go back to sleep.

  Then half an hour later he’d come back. If she was asleep, if she didn’t hear him call her name, he’d slip into the bed with her. And touch her, and kiss her, and not on her forehead this time.

  She would wake up when this happened, but somehow knew to feign sleep. And he would do what he did.

  Before long she pretended to be asleep whenever he came into the room. She’d hear him ask if she was asleep, and she’d lie there silent and still, and he’d come into her bed. She liked it, she didn’t like it. She loved him, she hated him.

  Eventually they dropped the pretense. Eventually he taught her how to touch him, and how to use her mouth on him. Eventually, eventually, there was very little they didn’t do.

  It took some work, but she got Jim hard again, and this time she made him come. He moaned audibly at the very end, then subsided into deep sleep almost immediately. She was exhausted, she felt as if she’d taken a drug herself, but she forced herself to go to the bathroom and look for some Listerine. She couldn’t find any, and wound up gargling with a mouthful of his Irish whiskey.

  She stopped in the kitchen, then returned to the bedroom. And, when she’d done what she needed to do, she decided it wouldn’t hurt to lie down beside him and close her eyes. Just for a minute...

  And now it was morning, and time for her to get out of there. She stood looking down at him, and for an instant she seemed to see his chest rise and fall with his slow even breathing, but that was just her mind playing a trick, because his chest was in fact quite motionless, and he wasn’t breathing at all. His breathing had stopped forever when she slid the kitchen knife between two of his ribs and into his heart.

  He’d died without a sound. La petite mort, the French called orgasm. The little death. Well, the little death had drawn a moan from him, but the real thing turned out to be soundless. His breathing stopped, and never resumed.

  She laid a hand on his upper arm, and the coolness of his flesh struck her as a sign that he was at peace now. She thought, almost wistfully, how very serene he had become.

  In a sense, there’d been no need to kill the man. She could have robbed him just as effectively while he slept, and the drug would ensure that he wouldn’t wake up before she was out the door. She’d used the knife in response to an inner need, and the need had in fact been an urgent one; satisfying it had shuttled her right off to sleep.

  Back in Hawley, her mother’s kitchen had held every kind of knife you could imagine. A dozen of them jutted out of a butcherblock knife holder, and others filled a shallow drawer. Sometimes she’d look at the knives, and think about them, and the things you could do with them. Cutting, piercing. Knife-type things.

  “You’re my little soldier,” her father used to say, and she felt like a soldier the night of her high school graduation, marching when her name was called, standing at attention to receive her diploma. She could feel the buzz in the audience, men and women telling each other how brave she was. The poor child, with all she’d been through.

  She never touched her mother’s knives, and for all she knew they were still in the kitchen in Hawley. But a few weeks later she left her apartment in St. Paul and went bar-hopping across the river in Minneapolis, and the young man she went home with had a set of knives in a butcher-block holder, just like her mother’s.

  Bad luck for him.

  She let herself out of the apartment, drew the door shut and made sure it locked behind her. The building was a walk-up, four apartments to the floor, and she made her way down three flights and out the door without encountering anyone.

  Time to think about moving.

  Not that she’d established a pattern. The man last week, in the posh loft near the Javits Center, had smothered to death. He’d been huge, and built like a wrestler, but the drug rendered him helpless, and all she’d had to do was hold the pillow over his face. He didn’t come close enough to consciousness to struggle. And the man before that, the advertising executive, had shown her why he’d feel safe in any neighborhood, gentrification or no. He kept a loaded handgun in the drawer of the bedside table, and if any burglar was unlucky enough to drop into his place, well—

  When she was through with him, she’d retrieved the gun, wrapped his hand around it, put the barrel in his mouth, and squeezed off a shot. They could call it a suicide,
even as they could call the wrestler a heart attack, if they didn’t look too closely. Or they could call all three of them murders without ever suspecting they were all the work of the same person.

  Still, it wouldn’t hurt her to move. Find another place to live before people started to notice her on the streets and in the bars. She liked it here, in Clinton or Hell’s Kitchen, whatever you wanted to call it. It was a nice place to live, whatever it may have been in years past. But, as she and Jim had agreed, the whole of Manhattan was a nice place to live. There weren’t any bad neighborhoods left, not really.

  Wherever she went, she was pretty sure she’d feel safe.

  THREE

  She woke up abruptly—click! Like that, no warmup, no transition, no ascent into consciousness out of a dream. She was just all at once awake, brain in gear, all of her senses operating but sight. Her eyes were closed, and she let them remain that way for a moment while she picked up what information her other senses could provide.

  She felt the cotton sheet under her, smooth. A good hand, a high thread count. Her host, then, wasn’t a pauper, and had the good taste to equip himself with decent bed linen. She didn’t feel a top sheet, felt only the air on her bare skin. Cool, dry air, air-conditioned air.

  Whisper-quiet, too. Probably central air-conditioning, because she couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear much, really. A certain amount of city noise, through windows that were no doubt shut to let the central air do its work. But less of it than she’d have heard in her own Manhattan apartment.

  And the energy level here was more muted than you would encounter in Manhattan. Hard to say what sense provided this information, and she supposed it was probably some combination of them all, some unconscious synthesis of taste and touch and smell and hearing, that let you know you were in one of the outer boroughs.

  Memory filled in the rest. She’d taken the 1 train clear to the end of the line, following Broadway up into the Bronx, and she’d gone to a couple of bars in Riverdale, both of them nice preppy places where the bartenders didn’t look puzzled when you ordered a Dog’s Breakfast or a Sunday Best. And then...

  Well, that’s where it got a little fuzzy.

  She still had taste and smell to consult. Taste, well, the taste in her mouth was the taste of morning, and all it did was make her want to brush her teeth. Smell was more complicated. There would have been more to smell without air conditioning, more to smell if the humidity were higher, but nevertheless there was a good deal of information available. She noted perspiration, male and female, and sex smells.

  He was right there, she realized. In the bed beside her. If she reached out a hand she could touch him.

  For a moment, though, she let her hand stay where it was, resting on her hip. Eyes still closed, she tried to bring his image into focus, even as she tried to embrace her memory of the later portion of the evening. She didn’t know where she was, not really. She’d managed to figure out that she was in a relatively new apartment building, and she figured it was probably in Riverdale. But she couldn’t be sure of that. He might have had a car, and he might have brought her almost anywhere. Westchester County, say.

  Bits and pieces of memory hovered at the edge of thought. Shreds of small talk, but how could she know what was from last night and what was bubbling up from past evenings? Sense impressions: a male voice, a male touch on her upper arm.

  She’d recognize him if she opened her eyes. She couldn’t picture him, not quite, but she’d know him when her eyes had a chance to refresh her memory.

  Not yet.

  She reached out a hand, touched him.

  She had just registered the warmth of his skin when he spoke.

  “Sleeping beauty,” he said.

  Her eyes snapped open, wide open, and her pulse raced.

  “Easy,” he said. “My God, you’re terrified, aren’t you? Don’t be. Everything’s all right.”

  He was lying on his side facing her. And yes, she recognized him. Dark hair, arresting blue eyes under arched brows, a full-lipped mouth, a strong jawline. His nose had been broken once and imperfectly reset, and that saved him from being male-model handsome.

  Early thirties, maybe eight or ten years her senior. A good body. A little chest hair, but not too much. Broad shoulders. A stomach flat enough to show a six-pack of abs.

  No wonder she’d left the bar with him.

  And she remembered leaving the bar. They’d walked, so she was probably in Riverdale. Unless they’d walked to his car. Could she remember any more?

  “You don’t remember, do you?”

  Reading her mind. And how was she supposed to answer that one?

  She tried for an ironic smile. “I’m a little fuzzy,” she said.

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Oh?”

  “You were hitting the Cosmos pretty good. I had the feeling, you know, that you might be in a blackout.”

  “Really? What did I do?”

  “Nothing they’d throw you in jail for.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “You didn’t stagger or slur your words, and you were able to form complete sentences. Grammatical ones, too.”

  “The nuns would be proud of me.”

  “I’m sure they would. Except...”

  “Except they wouldn’t like to see me waking up in a strange bed.”

  “I’m not sure how liberal they’re getting these days,” he said. “That wasn’t what I was going to say.”

  “Oh.”

  “You didn’t know where you were, did you? When you opened your eyes.”

  “Not right away.”

  “Do you know now?”

  “Well, sure,” she said. “I’m here. With you.”

  “Do you know where ‘here’ is? Or who I am?”

  Should she make something up? Or would the truth be easier?

  “I don’t remember getting in a car,” she said, “and I do remember walking, so my guess is we’re in Riverdale.”

  “But it’s a guess.”

  “Well, couldn’t we call it an educated guess? Or at least an informed one?”

  “Either way,” he said, “it’s right. We walked here, and we’re in Riverdale.”

  “So I got that one right. But why wouldn’t the nuns be proud of me?”

  “Forget the nuns, okay?”

  “They’re forgotten.”

  “Look, I don’t want to get preachy. And it’s none of my business. But if you’re drinking enough to leave big gaps in your memory, well, how do you know who you’re going home with?”

  Whom, she thought. The nuns wouldn’t be proud of you, buster.

  She said, “It worked out all right, didn’t it? I mean, you’re an okay guy. So I guess my judgment was in good enough shape when we hooked up.”

  “Or you were lucky.”

  “Nothing wrong with getting lucky.”

  She grinned as she spoke the line, but he remained serious. “There are a lot of guys out there,” he said, “who aren’t okay. Predators, nut cases, bad guys. If you’d gone home with one of those—”

  “But I didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know? Well, here we are, both of us, and...what do you mean, how do I know?”

  “Do you remember my name?”

  “I’d probably recognize it if I heard it.”

  “Suppose I say three names, and you pick the one that’s mine.”

  “What do I get if I’m right?”

  “What do you want?”

  “A shower.”

  This time he grinned. “It’s a deal. Three names? Hmmm. Peter. Harley. Joel.”

  “Look into my eyes,” she said, “and say them again. Slowly.”

  “What are you, a polygraph? Peter. Harley. Joel.”

  “You’re Joel.”

  “I’m Peter.”

  “Hey, I was close.”

  “Two more tries,” he said, “and you’d have had it for sure. You told me your name was
Jennifer.”

  “Well, I got that one right.”

  “And you told me to call you Jen.”

  “And did you?’

  “Did I what?”

  “Call me Jen.”

  “Of course. I can take direction.”

  “Are you an actor?”

  “As sure as my name is Joel. Why would you...oh, because I said I could take direction? Actually I had my schoolboy ambitions, but by the time I got out of college I smartened up. I work on Wall Street.”

  “All the way downtown. What time is it?”

  “A little after ten.”

  “Don’t you have to be at your desk by nine?”

  “Not on Saturday.”

  “Oh, right. Uh, Peter...or do I call you Pete?”

  “Either one.”

  “Awkward question coming up. Did we...”

  “We did,” he said, “and it was memorable for one of us.”

  “Oh.”

  “I felt a little funny about it, because I had the feeling you weren’t entirely present. But your body was really into it, no matter where your mind was, and, well—”

  “We had a good time?”

  “A very good time. And, just so that you don’t have to worry, we took precautions.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “And then you, uh, passed out.”

  “I did?”

  “It was a little scary. You just went out like a light. For a minute I thought, I don’t know—”

  “That I was dead,” she supplied.

  “But you were breathing, so I ruled that out.”

  “That keen analytical mind must serve you well on Wall Street.”

  “I tried to wake you,” he said, “but you were gone. So I let you sleep. And then I fell asleep myself, and, well, here we are.”

  “Naked and unashamed.” She yawned, stretched. “Look,” she said, “I’m going to treat myself to a shower, even if I didn’t win the right in the Name That Stud contest. Don’t go away, okay?”

  The bathroom had a window, and one look showed that she was on a high floor, with a river view. She showered, and washed her hair with his shampoo. Then she borrowed his toothbrush and brushed her teeth diligently, and gargled with a little mouthwash.