Gerald’s Game

CHAPTER FOUR

This time it wasn’t her body she visualized in the darkness behind her lids but this whole room. Of course she was still the centerpiece, gosh, yes-Jessie Mahout Burlingame, still a shade under forty, still fairly trim at five-seven and a hundred and twenty-five pounds, gray eyes, brownish-red hair (she covered the gray that had begun to show up about five years ago with a glossy rinse and was fairly sure Gerald had never known). Jessie Mahout Burlingame, who had gotten herself into this mess without quite knowing how or why. Jessie Mahout Burlingame, now presumably the widow of Gerald, still mother of no one, and tethered to this goddamned bed by two sets of police handcuffs.

She made the imaging part of her mind zoom in on these last. A furrow of concentration appeared between her closed eyes.

Four cuffs in all, each pair separated by six inches of rubbersleeved steel chain, each with M- 17-a serial number, she assumed-stamped into the steel of the lock-plate. She remembered Gerald’s telling her, back when the game was new, that each cuff had a notched take-up arm, which made the cuff adjustable. It was also possible to shorten the chains until a prisoner’s hands were jammed painfully together, wrist to wrist, but Gerald had allowed her the maximum length of chain.

And why the hell not? she thought now. After all, it was only agame…right, Gerald? Yet now her earlier question occurred to her, and she wondered again if it had ever really been just a game for Gerald.

What’s a woman? some other voice-a UFO voice-whispered softly from a well of darkness deep inside her. A life-support systemfor a cunt.

Go away, Jessie thought. Go away, you’re not helping.

But the UFO voice declined the order. Why does a woman havea mouth and a cunt? it asked instead. So she can piss and moan at thesame time. Any other questions, little lady?

No. Given the unsettlingly surreal quality of the answers, she had no other questions. She rotated her hands inside the cuffs. The scant flesh of her wrists dragged against the steel, making her wince, but the pain was minor and her hands turned easily enough. Gerald might or might not have believed that a woman’s only purpose in life was to serve as a life-support system for a cunt, but he hadn’t tightened the cuffs enough to hurt; she would have balked at that even before today, of course (or so she told herself, and none of the interior voices were mean enough to dispute her on the subject). Still, they were too tight to slip out Of.

Or were they?

Jessie gave them an experimental tug. The cuffs slid up her wrists as her hands came down, and then the steel bracelets wedged firmly against the junctions of bone and cartilage where the wrists made their complex and marvellous alliances with her hands.

She yanked harder. Now the pain was much more intense. She suddenly remembered the time Daddy had slammed the driver s-side door of their old Country Squire station wagon on Maddy’s left hand, not knowing she was sliding out on his side for a change instead of on her own. How she had screamed! It had broken some bone-Jessie couldn’t remember the name of it but she did remember Maddy proudly showing off her soft cast and saying, “I also tore my posterior ligament.” That had struck Jess and Will as funny, because everyone knew that your posterior was the scientific name for your situpon. They had laughed, more in surprise than in scorn, but Maddy had gone storming off just the same, her face as dark as a thundercloud, to tell Mommy.

Posterior ligament, she thought, deliberately applying more pressure in spite of the escalating pain. Posterior ligament and radio-ulnarsomething-or-other. Doesn’t matter. If you can slip out of these cuffs, Ithink you better do it, toots, and let some doctor worry about puttingHumpty back together again later on.

Slowly, steadily, she increased the pressure, willing the handcuffs to slip down and off. If they would just go a little way-a quarter of an inch might do it, and a half was almost for sure she would be past the bulkiest ridges of bone and would have more yielding tissue to deal with. Or so she hoped. There were bones in her thumbs, of course, but she would worry al»out them when and if the time came.

She pulled down harder, her lips parting to show her teeth in a grimace of pain and effort. The muscles on her upper arms now stood out in shallow white arcs. Sweat began to bead her brow, her cheeks, even the slight indentation of her philtrum below her nose. She poked out her tongue and licked off this last without even being aware of it.

There was a lot of pain, but the pain wasn’t what caused her to stop. What did was the simple realization that she had gotten to the point of maximum pull her muscles would provide and it hadn’t moved the cuffs a whit farther down than they were right now. Her brief hope of simply squeezing out of this flickered and died.

Are you sure you pulled as hard as you could? Or are you maybe onlykidding yourself a little because it hurt so much?

“No,” she said, still not opening her eyes. “I pulled as hard as I could. Really.”

But that other voice remained, actually more glimpsed than heard: something like a comic-book question-mark.

There were deep white grooves in the flesh of her wrists-below the pad of the thumb, across the back of the hand, and over the delicate blue tracings of vein below-where the steel had bitten in, and her wrists continued to throb painfully even though she had taken off all the pressure of the cuffs by raising her hands until she could grip one of the headboard slats.

“Oh boy,” she said, her voice shaky and uneven. “Doesn’t this just suck the big one.”

Had she pulled as hard as she could? Had she really?

Doesn’t matter, she thought, looking up at the shimmers of reflection on the ceiling. Doesn’t matter and I’ll tell you why-if Iam capable of pulling harder, what happened to Maddy’s left wrist whenthe car door slammed on it is going to happen to both of mine: bones aregoing to break, posterior ligaments are going to snap like rubber bands,and radio-ulnar whojiggies are going to explode like clay pigeons in ashooting gallery. The only thing that would change is that, instead oflying here chained and thirsty, I’d he lying here chained, thirsty, and with a pair of broken wrists thrown into the bargain. They’d swell, too.What I think is this: Gerald died before be ever bad a chance to climbinto the saddle, but he tucked me good and proper just the same.

Okay; what other options were there?

None, Goodwife Burlingame said in the watery tone of a woman who is just a teardrop away from breaking down completely.

Jessie waited to see if the other voice-Ruth’s voice-would weigh in with an opinion. It didn’t. For all she knew, Ruth was floating around in the office water-cooler with the rest of the loons. In any case, Ruth’s abdication left Jessie to fend for herself.

So, okay, fend, she thought. What are you going to do about thehandcuffs, now that you’ve ascertained simply slipping out of them isimpossible? What can you do?

There are two handcuffs in each set-the young voice, the one she hadn’t yet found a name for, spoke up hesitantly. You’ve tried toslip out of the ones with your hands inside them and it didn’t work…but what about the others? The ones hooked to the bedposts? Have youthought about them?

Jessie pressed the back of her head into her pillow and arched her neck so she could look at the headboard and the bedposts. The fact that she was looking at these things upside down barely registered. The bed was smaller than a king or a queen but quite a bit larger than a twin. It had some sort of fancy name-Court jester Size, maybe, or Chief Lady-in-Waiting-but she found it harder and harder to keep track of such things as she got older; she didn’t know if you called that good sense or encroaching senility. In any case, the bed on which she now found herself had been just right for screwing but a little too small for the two of them to share comfortably through the night.

For her and Gerald that hadn’t been a drawback, because they had slept in separate rooms, both here and in the Portland house, for the last five years. It had been her decision, not his; she had gotten tired of his snoring, which seemed to get a little worse every year. On the rare occasions when they had overnight guests down here, she and Gerald had slept together-uncomfortably-in this room, but otherwise they had shared this bed only when they had sex. And his snoring hadn’t been the real reason she had moved out; it had just been the most diplomatic one. The real reason had been olfactory. Jessie had first come to dislike and then actually loathe the aroma of her husband’s night-sweat. Even if he showered just before coming to bed, the sour smell of Scotch whisky began to creep out of his pores by two the next morning.

Until this year, the pattern had been increasingly perfunctory sex followed by a period of drowsing (this had actually become her favorite part of the whole business), after which he would shower and leave her. Since March, however, there had been some changes. The scarves and the handcuffs-particularly the latter had seemed to exhaust Gerald in a way plain old missionary-style sex never had, and he often fell deeply asleep next to her, shoulder to shoulder. She didn’t mind this; most of those encounters had been matinees, and Gerald smelled like plain old sweat instead of a weak Scotch and water afterward. He didn’t snore much, either, come to think of it.

But all those sessions-all those matinees with the scarves and thehandcuffs-were in the Portland house, she thought. We spent most ofJuly and some of August down here, hut on the occasions when we hadsex-there weren’t many, hut there were some-it was the plain oldpot-roast-and-mashed-potatoes kind.-Tarzan on top, Jane on the bottom.We never played the game down here until today. Why was that, Iwonder?

Probably it had been the windows, which were too tall and oddly cut for drapes. They had never gotten around to replacing the clear glass with reflective sheets, although Gerald had continued to talk about doing that right up to… well…

Right up until today, Goody finished, and Jessie blessed her tact. And you’re right-it probably was the windows, at least mostly. Hewouldn’t have liked Fred Laglan or Jamie Brooks driving in to ask onthe spur of the moment if he wanted to play nine holes of golf and seeinghim boffing Mrs Burlingame, who just happened to he attached to thebedposts with a pair of Kreig handcuffs. Word on something like thatwould probably get around, Fred and Jamie are good enough fellows, Iguess-

A couple of middle-aged pukes, if you ask me, Ruth broke in sourly.-but they’re only human, and a story like that would have been toogood not to talk about. And there’s something else, Jessie…

Jessie didn’t let her finish. This wasn’t a thought she wanted to hear articulated in the Goodwife’s pleasant but hopelessly prissy voice.

It was possible that Gerald had never asked her to play the game down here because he had been afraid of some crazy joker oopping out of the deck. What joker? Well, she thought, let’s justsay that there might have been a part of Gerald that really did believe awoman was just a life-support system for a cunt…and that some otherpart of him, one I could call “Gerald’s better nature.” for want of a clearerterm, knew it. That part could have been afraid that things might getout of control. After all, isn’t that just what’s happened?

It was a hard idea to argue with. If this didn’t fit the definition of out of control, Jessie didn’t know what did.

She felt a moment of wistful sadness and had to restrain an urge to look back toward the place where Gerald lay. She didn’t know if she had grief in her for her late husband or not, but she did know that if it was there, this wasn’t the time to deal with it. Still, it was nice to remember something good about the man with whom she had spent so many years, and the memory of the way he had sometimes fallen asleep beside her after sex was a good one. She hadn’t liked the scarves and had come to loathe the handcuffs, but she had liked looking at him as he drifted off; had liked the way the lines smoothed out of his large pink face.

And, in a way, he was sleeping beside her again right now… wasn’t he?

That idea chilled even the flesh of her upper thighs, where the narrowing patch of sun lay. She turned the thought aside-or at least tried to-and went back to studying the head of the bed.

The posts were set in slightly from the sides, leaving her arms spread but not uncomfortably so, particularly with the six inches or so of free play afforded by the handcuff chains. There were four horizontal boards running between the posts. These were also mahogany, and engraved with simple but pleasing wave-shapes. Gerald had once suggested that they have their initials carved in the center board-he knew of a man in Tashmore Glen who would be happy to drive over and do it, he said-but she had poured cold water on the idea. It seemed both ostentatious and strangely childish to her, like teenybop sweethearts carving hearts on their study-hall desks.

The bed-shelf was set above the topmost board, just high enough to ensure that no one sitting up suddenly would bump his or her head. It held Gerald’s glass of water, a couple of paperbacks left over from the summer, and, on her end, a little strew of cosmetics. These were also left over from the summer gone by, and she supposed they were dried out by now. A real shame, too-nothing cheered up a handcuffed woman more reliably than a little Country Morning Rose Blusher. All the women’s magazines said so.

Jessie lifted her hands slowly, holding her arms out at a slight angle so her fists wouldn’t fetch up on the underside of the shelf. She kept her head back, wanting to see what happened on the far end of the chains. The other cuffs were clamped to the bedposts between the second and third crossboards. As she lifted her fisted hands, looking like a woman bench-pressing an invisible barbell, the cuffs slid along the posts until they reached the next board up. If she could pull that board off, and the one above it, she would be able to simply slip the handcuffs off the ends of the bedposts. Voila.

Probably too good to be true, bon-too easy to be true-but you mightas well give it a shot. It’s a way to pass the time, anyway.

She wrapped her hands around the engraved horizontal board currently barring any further upward progress for the cuffs clamped to the bedposts. She took a deep breath, held it, and yanked. One hard tug was enough to tell her that way was also blocked; it was like trying to pull a steel retaining rod out of a concrete wall. She could nor feel even a millimeter’s worth of give.

I could yank on that bastard for ten years and not even move it, letalone pull it off the bedposts, she thought, and let her hands fall back to their former slack, chain-supported position above the bed. A despairing little cry escaped her. To her it sounded like the caw of a thirsty crow.

“What am I going to do?” she asked the shimmers on the ceiling, and at last gave way to desperate, frightened tears. “Just what in the hell am I going to do?”

As if in answer, the dog began to bark again, and this time it was so close it scared her into a scream. It sounded, in fact, as if it was right outside the east window, in the driveway.