A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

One day at the home of some people Mark knew who lived in the area, where he had taken her on a New Year’s Day drop-in visit, she met a young man named Garrett Hill. He was branch head for a company in Pittsfield.

It was as simple as that — they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be simple, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple.

Then she met him a second time, by accident. Then a third, by coincidence. A fourth, by chance... Or directed by unseen forces?

Then she started to see him on a regular basis, without meaning anything, certainly without meaning any harm. The first night he brought her home they chatted on the way in his car; and then at the door, as he held out his hand, she quickly put hers out of sight behind her back.

“Why are you afraid to shake my hand?”

“I thought you’d hurt me.”

“How can anyone hurt you by just shaking your hand?”

When he tried to kiss her, she turned and fled into the house, as frightened as though he’d brandished a whip at her.

When he tried it again, on a later night, again she recoiled sharply — as if she were flinching from some sort of punishment.

He looked at her, and his eyes widened, both in sudden understanding and in disbelief. “You’re afraid physically,” he said, almost whispering. “I thought it was some wifely scruple the other night. But you’re physically afraid of being kissed! As if there were pain attached to it.”

Before she could stop herself or think twice she blurted out, “Well, there is, isn’t there?”

He said, his voice deadly serious. “What kind of kissing have you been used to?”

She hung her head. And almost the whole story had been told.

His face was white as a sheet. He didn’t say another word. But one man understands another well; all are born with that particular insight.

The next week she went into the town to do some small shopping — shopping she could have done as easily over the phone. Did she hope to run across him during the course of it? Is that why she attended to it in person? And after it was taken care of she stopped into a restaurant to sit down over a cup of coffee while waiting for her bus. He came into the place almost immediately afterward; he must have been sitting in his car outside watching for her.

He didn’t ask to sit down; he simply leaned over with his knuckles resting on the table, across the way from her, and with a quick back glance toward the door by which he had just entered, took a book out from under his jacket and put it down in front of her, its title visible.

“I sent down to New York to get this for you,” he said. “I’m trying to help you in the only way I know how.”

She glanced down at it. The title was: The Marquis de Sade. The Complete Writings.

“Who was he?” she asked, looking up. She pronounced it with the long A, as if it were an English name. “Sayd.”

“Sod,” he instructed. “He was a Frenchman. Just read the book,” was all he would say. “Just read the book.”

He turned to leave her, and then he came back for a moment and added, “Don’t let anyone else see—” Then he changed it to, “Don’t let him see you with it. Put a piece of brown wrapping paper around it so the title won’t be conspicuous. As soon as you’ve finished, bring it back; don’t leave it lying around the house.”

After he’d gone she kept staring at it. Just kept staring.

They met again three days later at the same little coffee shop off the main business street. It had become their regular meeting place by now. No fixed arrangement to it; he would go in and find her there, or she would go in and find him there.

“Was he the first one?” she asked when she returned the book.

“No, of course not. This is as old as man — this getting pleasure by giving pain. There are some of them born in every generation. Fortunately not too many. He simply was the first one to write it up and so when the world became more specialized and needed a separate tag for everything, they used his name. It became a word — sadism, meaning sexual pleasure got by causing pain, the sheer pleasure of being cruel.”

She started shaking all over as if the place were drafty. “It is that.” She had to whisper it, she was so heartsick with the discovery. “Oh, God, yes, it is that.”

“You had to know the truth. That was the first thing. You had to know, you had to be told. It isn’t just a vagary or a whim on his part. It isn’t just a — well, a clumsiness or roughness in making love. This is a frightful thing, a deviation, an affliction, and — a terrible danger to you. You had to understand the truth first.”

“Sometimes he takes his electric shaver—” She stared with frozen eyes at nowhere out before her. “He doesn’t use the shaver itself, just the cord — connects it and—”

She backed her hand into her mouth, sealing it up.