Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (3 page)

“It’s easy to misunderstand Avery,” Barbara’s saying. They’re in her car, in a corner of the parking lot of Avery’s building. “I mean, Avery’s so gruff. It’s really cute how gruff he is. I gave him a stuffed bear once, with a note, it said: ‘You’re just a big old bear!’ The way he talks is very short sometimes, and pretty blue, if you know what I mean, but he’s really very, very sweet and sometimes he—”

“There any money in that place?” VJ interrupts, looking through the windshield at the little sienna-colored office building. Kind of place built in the early seventies, with those chunks of rocks on the roof, some insulation fad. “I think you frontin’, girl, I don’t think there’s shit in there.”

At least, she thinks, I’ve graduated from ho to girl. “He keeps a lot of cash in his safe. I think he’s hiding it from the IRS. It was part of some payoff kind of thing for—”

“Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred thousand dollars. It is quite a lot of money, isn’t it? I never really thought about it much before . . . ”

“That place kind of rundown, don’t look like anybody in there doing that good.”

“The recession killed two of the businesses that were there, and it’s a little place and Avery’s the only one left and he owns the building and he’s gonna renovate—he’s really just incredibly smart about those things, he always has these great plans for—”

“Damn. Shut the fuck up about the man!” Reebok snarled. “Motherfucker!”

“Fine, but just remember we can’t go in there shooting because I don’t want Avery to get hurt—”

“Ho, what the fuck you talkin’ about—we step where we want, we got the motherfuckin’ guns—”

“You need me. I know the combination to the safe.”

Reebok goes tense in the backseat and shoves his gun at her. “And I know how to use this piece right here, you fuckin’ whitetail bitch!”

“Then shoot me,” she says, shrugging, surprising herself again. But meaning it. She doesn’t care that much, really. Velma has Avery and nothing matters except Avery. That’s what people don’t understand. Avery belongs to her, and he is the cornerstone, and he is Man and she is Woman, and that’s that, and people should understand it. “I really don’t care that much,” she goes on. “Torture me. Kill me. I’m not going to do it unless we do it my way.”

The muscles in VJ’s jaw bunch up. He points the gun at her face.

She looks into VJ’s eyes. “Do it. Kill me. Throw away the money.”

VJ looks at her for a full ten seconds. Then he lowers his gun and reaches into the back, and pushes Reebok’s gun down.

Right on the desk. He was doing it to her right on the desk, and he was telling her he loved her. He had her legs spread, her bony knees in his big, rough hands, and he had his pants down around his ankles, and there were zits on her thighs, she was wearing some kind of hooker costume, and . . .

He was telling her he loved her.

Then Avery’s head snapped around to look at them, his mouth open and gasping with effort, his face mottled, forehead drippy, and he blinked at them. “She locked the office door . . . ” Kind of blurting it. Then he focused on Barbara and realized she must have copied the keys.

Then—she can see it in his face—he realizes he’s standing there with his pants down and his penis in Velma, who’s propped on a desk with her legs spread, and two strange black guys are standing behind Barbara staring at him over her shoulder.

“Jesus Christ Mary Mother of God” is what he says next as he pulls out his penis and grabs his pants, and Velma opens her eyes and sees Barbara and Reebok and VJ and screams.

Velma scrambles off the desk, hunching down behind it. Avery hits the silent alarm button, but it doesn’t work; Barbara switched it off.

When Barbara was a little girl in Florida, she witnessed a hurricane. She was staying at her granddad’s orange farm. Her grandma kept chickens, and Barbara looked through a knothole in the wall of the storm shelter and saw a chicken spreading its wings and being caught by the wind and the chicken was lifted into the sky and it disappeared up there, in the boiling air. Barbara feels now like there’s a big wind behind her, pushing her into the room, only the wind is inside her, and she does what it wants to do, and it’s carrying her around the room, like a tornado’s whirling, carrying her around and around the desk, and it’s howling out of her: “That’s how she traps you, Avery! That’s how she did it and she’s dressed like a hooker and that’s completely right because she is a whore, she’s a WHORE who’s trapped you with her cunt and she is an evil, evil WHORE!”

Avery has his pants up and he is seeing Reebok and VJ come into the room and he is reaching into the desk drawer. Barbara is swept up to the desk by the wind feeling, and she slams the desk drawer on his hand. “No.”

Avery yelps with hurt, and when she hears that, something just lets go inside Barbara; a spillway opens up in her and she thinks, I forgot what feeling good feels like. She hasn’t felt this good since she was little, before some things started happening to her.

Now she finds herself drawn to the sound that Velma is making: Velma cursing under her breath as she hustles toward the side door to her office, thinking she’s going to get to a phone, call 911.

Barbara looks VJ in the eye and says, “Don’t let her get away, she’s got the money. Shoot her in the legs.”

VJ jerks out the gun—and hesitates. Velma’s got her hand on the doorknob.

“Barbara, Jeezus Christ!” Avery yells, clutching his swelling hand to his stomach.

“VJ,” Reebok says. “Shit. Just grab her.”

“No, shoot her in the goddamn legs or we lose the money!” Barbara says, saying it big, the voice coming from her with that stormfront behind it.

Then the thunder: the gun in VJ’s hand.

Velma screams and Barbara feels another release of good feeling roll through her as pieces of Velma’s knees spatter the door and embed in the wall and blood gushes over the carpet. Avery bolts for the door and, feeling like a Greek goddess, Barbara points at him and commands Reebok, “Hurt that traitor with your gun! Hurt him! He’s stealing everything that’s ours! Stop him.”

Reebok seems surprised when the gun in his hand goes off— maybe it was more a squeeze of fear in his fingers than a real decision to shoot—and a hole with little red petals on it like a small red daisy appears on Avery’s back, then another—

Avery spins around, howling, mouth agape, eyes like those of a toddler terrified of a barking dog; Avery trying to fend off bullets with his pudgy fingers—she never saw before how pudgy they were—as Barbara reaches over and grabs Reebok’s hand and points the gun downward at Avery’s penis as his unfastened pants slip down. She pulls the trigger and the tip of his penis disappears—which she saw only that one other time, uncircumcised, with that funny little hose tip on it—and she shouts, “Now you’re circumcised, Avery, you traitor fucking that whore you pig!”

Reebok and Avery scream at the same time almost the same way.

Then she notices Velma sobbing. Barbara crosses the room to Velma, picking up something off the desk as she goes, not really consciously noticing what it is till she’s kneeling beside Velma, who’s trying to crawl away, and Barbara’s driving the paper spike into her neck, one of those spikes your kid makes for you in shop with a little wooden disk, still has some receipts on it getting all bloody as the nail goes ka-chunk into her neck three times, four times, and Avery is screaming louder and louder, so VJ turns to him and yells, “Shut the fuck up!” and makes the top of Avery’s head disappear at the same moment that Barbara drives the spike again into Velma kachunk-boom!, the nail going in right behind her ear, and Velma suddenly pees herself and stops flopping, right in mid-flop, she stops . . .

“Oh, fuck,” Reebok is saying, sobbing as Barbara gets up, moving through a sort of sweet, warm haze as she goes to the corner of the room and points at the cabinet that has the safe hidden in it and says, “Forty-one, thirty-five, and . . . seven.”

It’s not until she’s in the car, on the road, pulling onto the freeway entrance, that Barbara notices that she peed herself, too, just like Velma. That’s funny. She’s surprised that she doesn’t really care much. She’s been surprised at herself all day. It feels good, it’s like on Oprah with those women talking about doing things they never thought they could do, that people said they couldn’t do, and how good they felt.

She has to change her skirt, though. She won’t chance stopping by her apartment, but she’ll send VJ into a Ross or someplace at that new mall out east of town, on the way—she’s made up her mind they’re going to Nevada, Mexico would be too obvious—and he can get some clothes for them with money from the safe, almost a hundred thousand dollars . . . They didn’t have to do discount now, they could go to Nordstrom’s.

But there was the problem of Reebok. His blubbering. “You’d better quiet him down,” she tells VJ softly. “The police are there by now, from all the noise, and they’re going to put out an APB and they might have a description of the car from somebody, but I don’t think so because no one was around, but even if they don’t . . . ” She was aware that she was talking in a rambling, on-and-on way, like she was on diet pills, but it didn’t matter, you just had to get it out. You had to get it out eventually. “ . . . even if they don’t have a description, they’re going to be looking for anything suspicious, and with him sobbing and waving a gun around . . . ”

“VJ,” Reebok says raspily, between gasping sobs, “look what this crazy bitch got us into . . . Look what she done.”

“I got you into a hundred thousand dollars.” She shrugs. And passes a Ford Taurus. “But I don’t think he should get any of the money, VJ,” she says. “I had to do half the job for him, and he’s going to panic and squeal on us.” She likes using that verb from old movies, squeal. “I think you should drop him off somewhere then we can go to Nevada and buy a new car for you, VJ, and some new clothes, maybe get you a real gold chain instead of that fake one, and you can have the watch I got in my bag, the watch I got for Avery, and some girls if you want, I don’t care. Or you can have me. As much as you want. Then we have to think about some more money. I’ve been thinking about banks. I read an article about all the mistakes bank robbers make. How they don’t move around enough, and all kinds of other mistakes, and I think we could be smarter.”

VJ nods numbly.

Reebok looks at him, blinking, gaping. “VJ?”

VJ points at an exit. “That one.”

The exit’s a good choice: Caltrans is doing a lot of construction there, though the workers have all gone home, so there’s lots of cover, what with the earthmovers and all the raw wood, to hide what they are doing from people passing on the freeway, and there are places where the earth is dug out, to hide the body. VJ made a smart choice—he’s the smart one of the two guys, smarter than she is, she decides, but that doesn’t matter, because she is stronger than VJ in a certain way. That’s what counts.

She’s thinking all this as she takes the South Road exit onto a utility road, in the country, with the construction between the road and the freeway, and no one around.

She pulls the car up in a good spot. Reebok looks at them and then bursts out of the car and starts running, and she says, “VJ, you know he’s going to tell, he’s too scared.” VJ swallows and nods, and gets out and the gun barks in his hand, and Reebok goes spinning. VJ has to shoot another time before Reebok stops yelling. Barbara, all the while, is watching the wind pinwheeling some trash by, some napkins from a Burger King . . . just trash blowing by . . .

Some more yelling. VJ has to shoot Reebok one last time.

She squints into the sky, watches a hawk teetering on an updraft.

VJ is throwing up now. He’ll feel better after throwing up. Throwing up always leaves a bad taste in the mouth, though.

She wonders what VJ’s penis will taste like. It will probably taste okay. He seems clean.

And VJ’s smart, and handsomer than Avery, and much younger, and she knows they belong together, she can feel it. It’s cute how VJ tries to hide it, but she can see it in his eyes when he thinks she’s not watching: he loves her. He does.

She breathed in the salt air above the cliffs, but it was him she smelled, his breath, the scent of evergreen boughs beside shallow water, the leaves in his hair.

Yesterday morning, he left. I had known he would only be here for those seven days. Now, just like that, they were gone.

It had stormed all night, but by the time I came downstairs to feed the woodstove, the gale had blown out to sea. It was still dark, chill October air sifting through cracks in the walls. Red and yellow leaves were flung everywhere outside. I stepped into the yard to gather a handful and pressed my face against them, cold and wet.

From the other side of the island a coyote yelped. I could hear the Pendletons’ rooster and a dog barking. Finally I went back inside, sat and watched the flames through the stove’s isinglass window. When Philip finally came down, he took one look at me, shook his head, and said, “No! I still have to go, stop it!”

I laughed and turned to touch his hand. He backed away quickly and said, “None of that.”

I saw how he recoiled. I have never kept him here against his will.

When Odysseus left, he was suspicious, accusatory. They say he wept for his wife and son, but he slept beside me each night for seven years and I saw no tears. We had two sons. His face was imprinted upon mine, just as Philip’s was centuries later: unshaven, warm, my cheeks scraped and my mouth swollen. In the morning I would wake to see Philip watching me, his hand moving slowly down the curve of my waist.

“No hips, no ass,” he said once. “You’re built like a boy.”

He liked to hold my wrists in one hand and straddle me. I wondered sometimes about their wives: were they taller than me? Big hips, big tits? Built like a woman?

Calypso. The name means the concealer. “She of the lovely braids” —that’s how Homer describes me. One morning Philip walked about my cottage, taking photos off the bookshelves and looking at them.

“Your hair,” he said, holding up a picture. “It was so long back then.”

I shrugged. “I cut it all off a year ago. It’s grown back—see?” Shoulder-length now, still blond, no gray.

He glanced at me, then put the picture back. “It looked good that way,” he said.

This is what happens to nymphs: they are pursued or they are left. Sometimes, like Echo, they are fled. We turn to trees, seabirds, seafoam, running water, the sound of wind in the leaves. Men come to stay with us, they lie beside us in the night, they hold us so hard we can’t breathe. They walk in the woods and glimpse us: a diving kingfisher, an owl caught in the headlights, a cold spring on the hillside. Alcyone, Nyctimene, Peirene, Echo, Calypso: these are some of our names. We like to live alone, or think we do. When men find us, they say we are lovelier than anything they have ever seen: wilder, stranger, more passionate. Elemental. They say they will stay forever. They always leave.

We met when Philip missed a flight out of Logan. I had business at the gallery that represents me in Cambridge and offered him a place to stay for the night: my hotel room.

“I don’t know too many painters,” he said. “Free spirits, right?” He was intrigued by what I told him of the island. The sex was good. I told him my name was Lyssa. After that we’d see each other whenever he was on the East Coast. He was usually leaving for work overseas but would add a few days to either end of his trip, a week even, so we could be together. I had been on the island for—how long? I can’t remember now.

I began sketching him the second time he came here. He would never let me do it while he was awake. He was too restless, jumping up to pull a book off the shelf, make coffee, pour more wine.

So I began to draw him while he slept. After we fucked he’d fall heavily asleep; I might doze for a few minutes, but sex energizes me, it makes me want to work.

He was perfect for me. Not conventionally handsome, though. His dark eyes were small and deep set, his mouth wide and uneven. Dark, thick hair, gray-flecked. His skin unlined. It was uncanny— he was in his early fifties but seemed as ageless as I was, as though he’d been untouched by anything, his time in the Middle East, his children, his wife, his ex-wife, me. I see now that this is what obsessed me—that someone human could be not merely beautiful but untouched. There wasn’t a crack in him; no way to get inside. He slept with his hands crossed behind his head, long body tipped across the bed. Long arms, long legs; torso almost hairless; a dark bloom on his cheeks when he hadn’t shaved. His cock long, slightly curved; moisture on his thigh.

I sketched and painted him obsessively, for seven years. Over the centuries there have been others. Other lovers, always; but only a few whom I’ve drawn or painted on walls, pottery, tapestry, paper, canvas, skin. After a few years I’d grow tired of them—Odysseus was an exception—and gently send them on their way. As they grew older they interested me less, because of course I did not grow old. Some didn’t leave willingly. I made grasshoppers of them, or mayflies, and tossed them into the webs of the golden orbweaver spiders that follow me everywhere I live.

But I never grew tired of Philip.

And I never grew tired of painting him. No one could see the paintings, of course, which killed me. He was so paranoid that he would be recognized, by his wife, his ex, one of his grown children. Coworkers.

I was afraid of losing him, so I kept the canvases in a tiny room off the studio. The sketchbooks alone filled an entire shelf. He still worried that someone would look at them, but no one ever came to visit me, except for him. My work was shown in the gallery just outside Boston. Winter landscapes of the bleak New England countryside I loved; skeletons of birds, seals. Temperas, most of them; some pen-and-ink drawings. I lived under Andrew Wyeth’s long shadow, as did everyone else in my part of the country. I thought that the paintings I’d done of Philip might change that perception. Philip was afraid that they would.

“Those could be your Helga paintings,” he said once. It was an accusation, not encouragement.

“They would be Calypso’s paintings,” I said. He didn’t understand what I meant.

Odysseus’s wife was a weaver. I was, too. It’s right there in Homer. When Hermes came to give me Zeus’s command to free Odysseus, I was in my little house on the island, weaving scenes into tunics for Odysseus and the boys. They were little then, three and five. We stood on the shore and watched him go. The boys ran screaming after the boat into the water. I had to grab them and hold them back; I thought the three of us would drown, they were fighting so to follow him.

It was horrible. Nothing was as bad as that, ever; not even when Philip left.

Penelope. Yes, she had a son, and like me she was a weaver. But we had more in common than that. I was thinking about her unraveling her loom each night, and it suddenly struck me: this was what I did with my paintings of Philip. Each night I would draw him for hours as he slept. Each day I would look at my work, and it was beautiful. They were by far my best paintings. They might even have been great.

And who knows what the critics or the public might have thought? My reputation isn’t huge, but it’s respectable. Those paintings could have changed all that.

But I knew that would be it: if I showed them, I would never see him again, never hear from him, never smell him, never taste him.

Yet even that I could live with. What terrified me was the thought that I would never paint him again. If he was gone, my magic would die. I would never paint again.

And that would destroy me: to think of eternity without the power to create. Better to draw and paint all night; better to undo my work each dawn by hiding it in the back room.

I thought I could live like that. For seven years I did. And then he left. The storm blew out to sea, the leaves were scattered across the lake. The house smelled of him still, my breath smelled of him, my hair. I stood alone at the sink, scrubbing at the pigments caked under my fingernails; then suddenly doubled over, vomiting on the dishes I hadn’t done yet from last night’s dinner.

I waited until I stopped shaking. Then I cleaned the sink, cleaned the dishes, squeezed lemons down the drain until the stink was gone. I put everything away. I went into the back room, stood for a long time and stared at the paintings there.

Seven years is a long time. There were a lot of canvases; a lot of sheets of heavy paper covered with his body, a lot of black books filled with his eyes, his cock, his hands, his mouth. I looked up at the corner of the room by the window, saw the web woven by the big yellow spider, gray strands dusted with moth wings, fly husks, legs. I pursed my lips and whistled silently, watched as the web trembled and the spider raced to its center, her body glistening like an amber bead. Then I went to my computer and booked a flight to Berlin.

It was a city that Philip loved, a city he had been to once, decades ago, when he was studying in Florence. He spent a month there— this was long before the Wall fell—never went back, but we had spoken, often, of going there together.

I had a passport—I’m a nymph, not an agoraphobe—and so I e-mailed my sister Arethusa, in Sicily. We are spirits of place; we live where the world exhales in silence. As these places disappear, so do we.

But not all of us. Arethusa and I kept in touch intermittently. Years ago she had lived on the Rhine. She said she thought she might still know someone in Germany. She’d see what she could do.

It turned out the friend knew someone who had a sublet available. It was in an interesting part of town, said Arethusa; she’d been there once. I was a little anxious about living in a city—I’m attached to islands, to northern lakes and trees, and I worried that I wouldn’t thrive there, that I might in fact sicken.

But I went. I paid in advance for the flat, then packed my paintings and sketchbooks and had them shipped over. I carried some supplies and one small sketchbook, half-filled with drawings of Philip, in my carry-on luggage. I brought my laptop. I closed up the cottage for the winter, told the Pendletons I was leaving and asked them to watch the place for me. I left them my car as well.

Then I caught the early morning ferry to the mainland, the bus to Boston. There was light fog as the plane lifted out of Logan, quickly dispersing into an arctic blue sky. I looked down and watched a long, serpentine cloud writhing above the Cape and thought of Nephele, a cloud nymph whom Zeus had molded to resemble Hera.

Why do they always have to change us into something else? I wondered, and sat back to watch the movie.

Berlin was a shock. We are by nature solitary and obsessive, which has its own dangers—like Narcissus, we can drown in silence, gazing at a reflection in a still pool.

But in a city, we can become disoriented and exhausted. We can sicken and die. We are long-lived, but not immortal.

So Arethusa had chosen my flat carefully. It was in Schöneberg, a quiet, residential part of the city. There were no high-rises. Chestnut trees littered the sidewalks with armored fruit. There were broad streets where vendors sold sunflowers and baskets of hazelnuts; old bookstores, a little shop that stocked only socks, several high-end art galleries; green spaces and much open sky.

“Poets lived there,” Arethusa told me, her voice breaking up over my cell phone. “Before the last big war.”

My flat was in a street of century-old apartment buildings. The foyer was high and dim and smelled of pipe tobacco and pastry dough. The flat itself had been carved from a much larger suite of rooms. There was a pocket-sized kitchenette, two small rooms facing each other across a wide hallway, a tiny, ultramodern bath.

But the rooms all had high ceilings and polished wooden floors glossy as bronze. And the room facing a courtyard had wonderful northern light.

I set this up as my studio. I purchased paints and sketchpads, a small easel. I set up my laptop, put a bowl of apples on the windowsill where the cool fall air moved in and out. Then I went to work.

I couldn’t paint.

Philip said that would happen. He used to joke about it—you’re nothing without me, you only use me, what will you do if ever I’m gone, hmmmm?