Small Town

But now she had to give them something decent, something that was certain to bring upwards of a hundred dollars at an auction where most of the bidders wouldn’t pay thirty-five cents to see Christ ride a bicycle.

Hell.

Well, it was her own damn fault. She’d think of something.

Her mother had died almost five years ago, and she offered up a silent apology at having taken her name in vain. It had seemed like the perfect excuse to turn aside the wrath of a pissy little queen like Harwood Zeller, and she had to say it had worked like a charm. But if she’d had any sense she’d never have needed it in the first place.

The real reason for her pique, and one she thought Zeller might well have understood, was even more clichéd. She’d been waiting for a phone call from a man, and it never came.

Her obsession with John Blair Creighton hadn’t ended when she’d run out of books to read. She emerged from his work with the conviction that she knew the man, that they were mated on some sort of psychic level. In Stelli’s, even as she’d apologized for intruding, she’d sent him a message with her eyes, and she knew he’d received it. He’d liked her looks, he’d responded to her, he’d taken the card she’d handed him — and then nothing. He hadn’t called.

And wouldn’t, now. Weeks had passed, and he’d have called in the first few days if he was going to call at all.

She could send him an announcement for Emory Allgood’s show, an invitation to the opening. She could add a handwritten note urging him to come. But he probably got a steady stream of those, like everybody else in Manhattan with a vague interest in or connection to the arts, and would probably discard it without even recognizing her name. Or he’d make a face, thinking Here’s a dame with a lot of crust, first she interrupts my meal, and now she wants to sell me some junk sculpture.

Besides, that wasn’t until November. Why did she have to wait that long?

On the nights when she was alone, she’d developed a ritual that she recognized as pathological even as she found it irresistible. She would bathe, and perfume herself. She’d had enlarged photos made from her two favorite dust jacket pictures of him, one taken outside Village Cigars on Sheridan Square, where he looked marvelously butch in a denim jacket and boots and a beard, the other a studio shot twenty years old, a portrait of the author as a young man, fresh-faced and innocent. These she placed on her bedside table, and lit the little lamp so she could see them.

Then she would touch herself while her mind occupied itself with the fantasy she had selected during her bath. Sometimes it was simple enough — she was Susan and he was John, and they loved with a love that was more than love, di dah di dah di dah.

Other times she became one or another of the female characters in his books, and played out scenes that departed from those he’d written, until she and her partner du jour were drawn into a maelstrom of passion.

More than once she was Marilyn Fairchild, with her auburn hair and her hot throaty voice, meeting him in a dingy Village bar and taking him home to her apartment. In that fantasy the two of them made fitful, angry love, moving from one position to another, snarling at each other while their bodies thrust away. At the end she lay writhing on her bed, a butt plug in her ass and the largest dildo deep in her cunt, while she strummed her clit with one hand and gripped her throat hard with the other.

That scared her, the first time she did it. Because in the fantasy it was two hands, not one, and his hands, not hers, and his grip didn’t loosen with her orgasm. She was imagining herself dying at his hands, and the notion evidently thrilled her.

But it was just a fantasy. It wasn’t really anything to worry about, was it?

It wasn’t as if she lacked for sexual outlets. Nor was her growing fascination with Creighton taking the joy out of her real encounters with real people. If her initial experiments had been designed in part to empower her sexually, then she’d succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. She seemed to grow more powerful every day, able to get almost anyone to do almost anything.

She remembered what she’d said to Franny, drawing a distinction between her own acts and whoring. She didn’t do what people liked. She did what they very definitely didn’t like, or at least didn’t know they liked, and made them like it.

Had Franny ever dreamed he’d like being treated like a girl, his body smooth and hairless, his flesh perfumed with scented oils? Every Friday night she took him to places he’d never been and showed him parts of himself he’d never imagined.