Small Town

Recounting the evening with Arlene, he realized that part of the excitement he’d felt with her came from knowing he’d be reporting in detail to Susan.

She listened intently and asked questions throughout. She wanted a full description of Arlene’s body, wanted to know just what he’d done and how he felt. When he was done she told him he deserved a reward, and she got out her kit of wax and cheesecloth. She trimmed his hair with a scissors, waxed his chest and underarms and groin, then rolled him over and did his backside.

The wax was hot, but not too hot to bear. The removal of the hair was painful, but also bearable. When she’d finished she made him touch himself and sat cross-legged while he stroked himself.

When he was close to climax she moved his hands away and took him in her mouth, then climbed onto him and kissed him full on the mouth, giving him his seed, commanding him to swallow it.

“Oh, Franny,” she said. “Our first kiss. Isn’t it romantic?”

He would see her again this Friday, and every Friday. He no longer entertained the notion of giving her up. He was, he supposed, enslaved, and it might be said that their relationship gave new meaning to the term pussy-whipped. He didn’t care. It didn’t seem to matter.

Once she’d asked him if it was true that he’d never been with a whore. Not until this summer, he said.

I’m not a whore, she said, and he said he hadn’t meant it as an insult. She said she hadn’t taken it for an insult, but that it was inaccurate. He said he knew that, that she didn’t take money, that he hadn’t meant it that way, but she cut off his explanation. She wasn’t talking about money, she said. Money aside, didn’t he know what a whore was?

A whore, she told him, would do anything he liked. She was entirely different. She would do things he didn’t like, and make him like them.

He didn’t call Arlene again, or any of several other women who might have been available to play a similar role. Even if he’d been interested, the thought of trying to explain his sudden lack of body hair was daunting.

When he went to the gym, he skipped the steam and sauna, waited until he got home to take his shower. He didn’t like the idea of anyone seeing him like this, and yet he was not entirely sorry she’d done it. He liked the smoothness of his skin, its sensitivity. And, while he didn’t want to expose his hairlessness, when he walked about with clothes on he felt like a man with a delicious secret.

It was strange, all of this, and he didn’t know what to make of it. He’d always taken it for granted that he knew who he was, and she kept showing him a side of himself the existence of which he hadn’t even suspected. She couldn’t have created this dark side, it would have to have been there all along, and he supposed it was better to know about it than not.

Or was it? William Boyce Harbinger (did his wife call him Bill? had his mother called him Billy?) must have had an unsuspected dark side of his own, forever hidden from view until the towers fell and shined an awful light on it. Harbinger, reborn as the Carpenter, must have been astonished by the acts he was capable of performing. Could anyone argue he was better off for it?

He kept coming back to the man, because he could think of nothing else besides his weekly descent into — into what? Depravity? Madness? His own unplumbed depths?

Better to think about the Carpenter. Maybe, somehow, he’d come up with a way to catch him.

twenty-four

The Carpenter sat on a bench in Riverside Park, not far from the Rotunda, and the Boat Basin Café. It was getting on for midnight. The café was closed, and a light rain an hour earlier had cleared the park of the few walkers and sitters who’d shared it with him. The Carpenter didn’t mind the rain. He scarcely noticed it.

From where he sat, he could keep an eye on one of his city’s greatest anomalies, the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin. This little complex of docks and piers at the Hudson’s edge allowed a favored few New Yorkers the privilege of mooring their boats there for an essentially negligible annual fee. Anyone who had a slip at the Boat Basin clung to it as if it were a rent-controlled apartment, and in fact it was that and more. If you were a boater, it afforded you economical dockage far more convenient than marinas like the one at City Island, way up in the remote northeastern region of the Bronx. But most of the boats moored at Seventy-ninth Street never left their slips, and many of them didn’t even have working engines, running their lights and appliances off propane generators. They were houseboats, with the stress very much on the first syllable, and their lucky occupants were able to live a raffish Bohemian life in wave-rocked comfort for considerably less than it would have cost them to park a car anywhere in Manhattan.