Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER TWENTY

When the worst of the cramps had passed-at least she hoped the worst of them had-she took a breather, leaning back against the slatted mahogany crossboards which formed the head of the bed, her eyes closed and her breath gradually slowing down-first to a lope, then a trot, and finally to a walk. Thirst or no thirst, she felt surprisingly good. She supposed part of the reason lay in that old joke, the one with the punchline that went “It feels so good when I stop.” But she had been an athletic girl and an athletic woman until five years ago (well, all right, maybe it was closer to ten), and she could still recognize an endorphin rush when she was having one. Absurd, given the circumstances, but also very nice.

Maybe not so absurd, Jess. Maybe useful. Those endorphins clear the mind, which is one reason why people work better after they’ve taken some exercise.

And her mind was clear. The worst of her panic had blown away like industrial smogs before a strong wind, and she felt more than rational; she felt wholly sane again. She never would have believed it possible, and she found this evidence of the mind’s tireless adaptability and almost insectile determination to survive a little spooky. All of this and I haven’t even had my morning coffee, she thought.

The image of coffee-black, and in her favorite cup with the blue flowers around its middle-made her lick her lips. It also made her think of the Today program. If her interior clock was right, Today would be coming on just about now. Men and women all over America-unhandcuffed, for the most part-were sitting at kitchen tables, drinking juice and coffee, eating bagels and scrambled eggs (or maybe one of those cereals that are supposed to simultaneously soothe your heart and excite your bowels). They were watching Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric yuck it up with Joe Garagiola. A little later they would watch Willard Scott wish a couple of centenarians a happy day. There would be guests one who would talk about something called the prime rate and something else called the Fed, one who would show viewers how they could keep their pet Chows from chewing up their slippers, and one who would plug his latest movie-and none of them would realize that over in western Maine there was an accident in progress; that one of their more-or-less-loyal viewers was unable to tune in this morning because she was handcuffed to a bed less than twenty feet from her naked, dogchewed, flyblown husband.

She turned her head to the right and looked up at the glass Gerald had set down carelessly on his side of the shelf shortly before the festivities had commenced. Five years ago, she reflected, that glass probably wouldn’t have been there, but as Gerald’s nightly Scotch consumption increased, so had his daily intake of all other liquids-mostly water, but he also drank tons of diet soda and iced tea. For Gerald, at least, the phrase “drinking problem” seemed to have been no euphemism but the literal truth.

Well, she thought drearily, if he did have a drinking problem, it’s certainly cured now, isn’t it?

The glass was exactly where she had left it, of course; if her visitor of the previous night had not been a dream (Don’t be silly, of course it was a dream, the Goodwife said nervously), it must not have been thirsty.

I’m going to get that glass, Jessie thought. I’m also going to be extremely careful, in case there are more muscle-cramps. Any questions?

There weren’t, and this time getting the glass turned out to be a cakewalk, because it was a lot easier to reach; there was no need for the balancing act. She discovered an added bonus when she picked up her makeshift straw. As it dried, the blow-in card had curled up along the folds she had made. This strange geometrical construct looked like free-form origami and worked much more efficiently than it had the previous night. Getting the last of the water was even easier than getting the glass, and as Jessie listened to the Malt Shoppe crackle from the bottom of the glass as her weird straw tried to suck up the last couple of drops, it occurred to her that she would have lost a lot less water to the coverlet if she had known she could “cure” the straw. Too late now, though, and no use crying over spilled water.

The few sips did little more than wake up her thirst, but she would have to live with that. She put the glass back on the shelf, then laughed at herself. Habit was a tough little beast. Even under bizarre circumstances such as these, it was a tough little beast. She had risked cramping up all over again to return the empty glass to the shelf instead of just bombing it over the side of the bed to shatter on the floor. And why? Because Neatness Counts, that was why. That was one of the things Sally Mahout had taught her tootsie, her little squeaky wheel who never got quite enough grease and who was never able to let well enough alone-her little tootsie who had been willing to go to any lengths, including seducing her own father, to make sure that things would continue to go the way she wanted them to go.

In the eye of her memory, Jessie saw the Sally Mahout she had seen so often back then: cheeks flushed with exasperation, lips pressed tightly together, hands rolled into fists and planted on her hips.

“And you would have believed it, too,” Jessie said softly. “Wouldn’t you, you bitch?”

Not fair, part of her mind responded uneasily. Not fair, Jessie!

Except it was fair, and she knew it. Sally had been a long way from the ideal mother, especially during those years when her marriage to Tom had been laboring along like an old car with dirt in the transmission. Her behavior during those years had often been paranoid, and sometimes irrational. Will had for some reason been almost completely spared her tirades and suspicions, but she had sometimes frightened both of her daughters badly.

That dark side was gone now. The letters Jessie got from Arizona were the banal, boring notes of an old lady who lived for Thursday Night Bingo and saw her child-rearing years as a peaceful, happy time. She apparently did not remember screaming at the top of her lungs that the next time Maddy forgot to wrap her used tampons in toilet paper before throwing them in the trash she would kill her, or the Sunday morning when she had-for no reason Jessie had ever been able to understand-stormed into Jessie’s bedroom, thrown a pair of high-heeled shoes at her, and then stormed out again.

Sometimes when she got her mother’s notes and postcards-All well here, sweetheart, heard from Maddy, she writes so faithfully, my appetite’s a little better since it cooled off-Jessie felt an urge to snatch up the telephone and call her mother and scream: Did you forget everything, Mom? Did you forget the day you threw the shoes at me and broke my favorite vase and I cried because I thought you must know, that he must have finally broken down and told you, even though it had been three years since the day of the eclipse by then? Did you forget how often you scared us with your screams and your tears

That’s unfair, Jessie. Unfair and disloyal.

Unfair it might be, but that did not make it untrue.

If she had known what happened that day-

The image of the woman in stocks recurred to Jessie again, there and gone almost too fast to be recognized, like subliminal advertising: the pinned hands, the hair covering the face like a penitent’s shroud, the little knot of pointing, contemptuous people. Mostly women.

Her mother might not have come right out and said so, but yes-she would have believed it was Jessie’s fault, and she really might have thought it was a conscious seduction. It wasn’t that much of a stretch from squeaky wheel to Lolita, was it? And the knowledge that something sexual had happened between her husband and her daughter very likely would have caused her to stop thinking about leaving and actually do it.

Believed it? You bet she would have believed it.

This time the voice of propriety didn’t bother with even a token protest, and a sudden insight came to Jessie: her father had grasped instantly what it had taken her almost thirty years to figure out. He had known the true facts just as he had known about the odd acoustics of the living room/dining room in the lake house.

Her father had used her in more ways than one on that day.

Jessie expected a flood of negative emotions at this sorry realization; she had, after all, been played for a sucker by the man whose primary jobs had been to love and protect her. No such flood came. Perhaps this was partly because she was still flying on endorphins, but she had an idea it had more to do with relief: no matter how rotten that business had been, she had finally been able to get outside it. Her chief emotions were amazement that she had held onto the secret for as long as she had, and a kind of uneasy perplexity. How many of the choices she had made since that day had been directly or indirectly influenced by what had happened during the final minute or so she had spent on her Daddy’s lap, looking at a vast round mole in the sky through two or three pieces of smoked glass? And was her current situation a result of what had happened during the eclipse?

Oh, that’s too much, she thought. If he’d raped me, maybe it would be different. But what happened on the deck that day was really just another accident, and not a very serious one, at that-if you want to know what a serious accident is, Jess, look at the situation you’re in here. I might as well blame old Mrs Gilette for slapping my hand at that lawn-party, the summer I was four. Or a thought I had coming down the birth-canal. Or sins from some past life that still needed expiation. Besides, what be did to me on the deck wasn’t anything compared to what he did to me in the bedroom.

And there was no need to dream that part of it; it was right there, perfectly clear and perfectly accessible.