Chapter 13
Something had happened to Steve Atkins when the Washington arrangement fell through. He had tasted defeat, bitter and ludicrous, much worse than the contretemps in Maine that led to his four years in prison there.
He had been run out of town on a rail. Not arrested or even threatened with arrest, but just run out.
Nigger, don't let the sun set on your head.. . .
He took refuge in shifting the blame on Lorna. The New England congressman had recognized her from some damn powwow she had attended with that prig-ass husband of hers. It had scared the living shit out of the politician; he immediately assumed that the sex party Steve had arranged was some kind of trap. His asshole buddy thought so, too, and both of them had panicked. The two of them had pulled in their meat and hauled ass out of the apartment so fast Steve didn't know what had hit him.
His reaction was to hit Lorna, which he had done. Several times. His rage in the face of failure and defeat was uncontrollable, and she bore the brunt of it. He accused her of doing or saying something-or not doing and not saying something-to offend the pair of customers, but she swore she hadn't. The only way out for her was to tell him the truth, and she finally did.
The dumb broad! If she had told him in the first place he wouldn't have hit her, and kept hitting her, and the neighbors would not have called the cops. As thick as the walls in the old building were, they had been penetrated by her screams and the reverberation of her body as it crashed into the wall.
It was a good thing Washington cops had more on their minds than "wife-beating." When they found that they had been called to such an elegant address they contented themselves with a stern lecture and a warning. Besides, the squad car radio was blasting away the whole time they were parked out front, giving off alarms of murder and mayhem, so they couldn't stay long or bother to haul Steve in. If they had, he would have had to fake ID and that was a dangerous game for somebody who had been in stir.
The next day, a goon squad came to see him, compliments of the congressman. They looked like the chorus line from a musical version of "The Godfather" and it was obvious that they were representatives of the Massachusetts Family.
He knew he was trapped and finished, and
Lorna knew it too. He would never be able to control her again. For her part, she seemed to be in a fog, hanging onto him out of sheer habit. His anger at her had vanished, along with his desire or even his interest. He looked upon her as something he took with him on his travels, like a suitcase. He did not want her around but he could not get rid of her. Something made him keep her with him even though he detested the sight of her because she reminded him of defeat. He would not admit to himself what her hold on him was even though he knew perfectly well what fascination she held for him.
He decided, after the Washington fiasco, to go to New Orleans. As they drove south in the early days of March the weather became increasingly warm and balmy, until, when they reached the Crescent City, the temperature was in the low eighties and matched by the humidity.
Something cloying and clinging about the weather, the way the sweat stayed on his brow, the way his clothes clung wetly to his body, made Steve intensely aware of the psychological adhesion between himself and Lorna. He realized that he could no more get rid of her than he could dispose of his sweat or any other intrinsic part of himself. New Orleans was sticky, and as he peeled off his jacket in the car he understood with a grim reluctance that the woman beside him could never be so easily removed from his life.
They rented an apartment in the Vieux Carre and he retreated into his books. All day and into the night he studied and read, underlined, made notes, stared out the window at the busy, garish streets and thought. The sounds from the Go-Go joints and their drunken, raucous customers did not penetrate his reflections; the loud patter of sidewalk barkers giving their come-on spiels to lure passers-by into the girlie shows went unheard.
In one of the books on reincarnation, Steve found a poem by Kipling and memorized it:
Strangers drawn from the ends of the earth, Jewelled and plumed were we;
I was the Lord of the Inca race
And she was the Queen of the Sea.
He often looked at Lorna in a quiet, studious way that contained no element of sex or economic appraisal. He did not try to make any contacts, or use her to make money in any way. They had plenty of cash for a good while, and for once he did not think about money. He wanted to study; he wanted quiet and contemplation to think about something, yet he could not bring himself to admit just what it was that he sought in his books.
Lorna knew. As the days passed, one exactly like the other, she could not help but see what he was doing. He was easy to live with now; quiet and amenable and without feistiness or that super-sensitivity that had been her despair in their first days. Remote, aloof, yes; but more pleasant-natured than she ever believed it was possible for him to be. When she asked, tentatively and expecting a rebuke, what he was reading, he showed her the book.
She read it one evening herself, along with the notes he had made. He was out for a walk but he had left all his papers in full view, making no effort to hide anything from her.
"Lorna and I have a Karmic attachment," he had written. "Somewhere in a past life we met each other and clashed, yet we also loved in a strange sort of way. We died before we could work out whatever Fate lay between us and now we have met again in this life in order to carry on the Karmic effort and bring it to some sort of resolution. Perhaps we will not be able to resolve it in this life and will thus meet still another time in some future incarnation."
The words frightened her, yet they contained a bizarre sort of enchantment and she reacted to them with the glee that a child feels when he watches magic tricks. Was it possible that there was no such thing as a first meeting? Had everyone met before? Her, Dan, his parents, her father. . . . and herself and Steve. There was a complex web spun around all of them in this life; had there been other webs linking them to one another in past lives?
She did not discuss the subject with him because she sensed that he wanted to work out some sort of philosophy on his own. For the first time in their relationship she felt something akin to a normal, affectionate emotion for him. When she looked at his neat penmanship, his well-chosen words, his careful and studious underlining of the passages in his books, she felt a rush of compassion. Inwardly she ached for the waste of his mind and his life, a waste to which she had contributed.
The apartment was furnished with twin beds but Steve did not approach her. After a few weeks in the sultry, sex-obsessed city of New Orleans she began to claw the rug. Through the open windows on the hot nights she could hear the sinuous beat of the strippers' music from the nightclubs. Throughout the French Quarter were posters and marquees of nearly naked women in suggestive poses. Now, with Steve, she was settling down into a dull, sexless sort of marriage just as she had done with Dan. Her body rebelled again, as it had once before. She was used to being two people now, two women, one wanton and the other bored and imprisoned in four walls. These two selves were too used to fighting one another to call a truce now.
She lay awake with a wet, aching cunt and thought about Nicky, the red-haired teenager who had made the mother-son movie with her. She wanted him as she had never wanted any man, even Steve. It had been she who suggested the theme of that film, including the use of the cage. They had hit the jackpot with it; they were living on the money from it now and it would last a long, long time.
She had found Nicky one day in New York, working in a hamburger joint. He developed an instantaneous crush on her and she continued going back to the joint to see him. His obsession for her as an older woman, and his red hair, made her think of herself at his age, when she had first slept with Daddy. When they made the movie, all she had to do was turn the roles around and make Nicky the sexy teenager and herself the forbidden parent.
She longed for his tireless young body now. When they made the movie, she had to hide her lust for Nicky in front of Steve, but now she sensed that he would not care what she did or whom she did it with. She remembered how he had called Nicky "Baby Dumpling." When the movie, which had been her idea, proved such a hit, Steve had been annoyed. What would he do now if Nicky were here? Nothing, she was sure. He would keep on reading and making notes.
She grew angry at the deprivation her body was forced to endure. If Steve didn't want her, why couldn't she have someone else? Besides, their money wouldn't last forever. If the movie were so good, why not make another one?
One day she wrote to Nicky and waited eagerly for a reply. She did not have to wait long, and when the reply came it was not a letter but Nicky himself. He was the first person to knock on the door since they rented the apartment. When they heard the sound they both jumped. Lorna, her heart beating in sickening heavy throbs, wondered if the Mass congressman had sent someone to track them down. Steve merely stared at the door, like a professor interrupted in the middle of perusing a rare manuscript.
"See who it is," he said with a shrug. She realized that he was not afraid, and it was then that she first knew for certain that he had given up his interest in life in favor of his obsessed study of death and its meaning.
When she opened the door, Nicky grinned at her. His tousled red hair was shoulder length and his pale skin was lobster-red from the hitchhiking he had done to get to her.
"Hi, got your letter, doll," he said, walking in.
She stared at his unbelievably trim hips in the skin-tight blue jeans. His monstrous cock was outlined clearly under the material and his balls formed a mouthwatering lump between his slender thighs. If she hadn't known better she would have taken him for young rough trade who stuffed foam rubber in his crotch to attract faggots.
But she knew much, much better.
Steve turned around and blinked, but there was no anger in his face. There was nothing at all on his bland, swarthy features except mild surprise that they should have any caller at all, much less someone they knew.
Nicky tossed a knapsack on the floor and sank down on the sofa. He greeted Steve with a nod and a knowing grin.
"Are we back in the movie business?"
Steve looked at Lorna, then shrugged.
"Why not? Might as well be, now that you're here. Did you bring your tool kit?" he said sardonically.
Nicky patted his crotch.
"I got growing pains the other night," he announced.
"The green giant," Steve muttered.
"Not green anymore, man. My Mom taught me all I need to know."
He gave Lorna a wink and a leering grin but underneath his jocular coarseness she saw the eyes of a young boy fascinated with an adult woman and filled with ardor for her body. He swallowed, and his bobbing Adam's apple in his thin young throat made him look younger than he was.
Steve took no offense, nor even any particular notice. Lorna gazed curiously at him, relieved at his attitude yet confused by it. She had lived with his tempers so long, yet now he seemed to have divested himself of all emotions. She thought: He's dead.. . . he's been thinking so much about the meaning of death that he's not really conscious of being alive anymore.
Nicky's next words made her thoughts all the more powerful. He took a bulging, tattered wallet from his pants pocket and drew forth a clipping.
"Your old man's dead, doll. Did you see this?"
Lorna turned slowly, thinking that of course her father was dead. Then she realized what the boy meant.
"What? You mean . . . Dan?"
She took the clipping and read:
"Daniel Perkins, counsel for the Maine Decent Films League and successful lawyer-son of Judge Nathaniel Perkins of the Superior Court here, was found dead in a hotel room in Portland. The body was hanging from a ceiling rafter by a noose fashioned from the deceased man's shoestrings. The Coroner's jury returned a verdict of suicide. No note was found, but family and friends opined that Perkins had been despondent because of his wife's desertion in September."
"Oh, my God.. . . " Dan!
Steve watched her, not hawkishly as he would have done a few weeks ago, but blandly, studiously, as if he were observing her for some kind of experiment. There was no jealously in his face now, though he had often shown himself jealous of Dan in the past. Suddenly he spoke.
"In his next life, he'll die at the moment when life is most dear." Lorna and Nicky turned to him in surprise. "What, man?" Nicky said.
"According to the tenets of reincarnation, if you commit suicide in one life, you have to pay for your sin in the next by being cut down at a time when you want most desperately to live."
They sat before him like students in a lecture hall. Nicky looked from one to the other.
"Say, you like the occult stuff?" he said. "I got a cool idea for our movie. A Black Mass, you know?"
For the first time since they had been in New Orleans, an expression of alert interest crossed Steve's face.