Scar Flowers (34 page)

“O
kay,” he smiled. “Yes, I agree. You can start now.” He let her go and sat back.

If not exactly chastened, she was at least reminded of how things stood.

“Sasha’s had her rabies vaccination, but you’ll need a tetanus shot. You should see a doctor.” Leah pulled the edges of the wound together with the first stitch.

Iodine burned its way into his arm
, and the needle burrowed and surfaced.

“Have you had to do this before?”

“No.” Leah directed him to clip the thread.

“No one’s ever tried to get free?”

“They all come to me. They want to be here.”

“They come to you? You don’t go looking for them? Get hired onto their jobs?”

She bent her head, intent on tying off a stitch.

“I made an exception with you,” she finally said. Leah held up a length of gauze for him to cut, then taped it to his arm.

“Why?” That question again, one he had asked her too many times. He thought he had reversed their positions, but it still felt the same.

“I wanted you for my collection.”

He stood and gripped her wrist with his good hand until she dropped the roll of tape she had been about use to secure his dressing. Her face remained blank, eyes looking down. Easy for her to play this game. Soon he would have to let her go, and after that
. . . when she locked the front door behind him, he could think about it all the way back to Skagway or whatever one-horse town he ended up in.

“Why did you offer yourself just now, in the other room?”

“The answer you want is that it was a power play.”

“The answer I want.”

“You’re not going to get what you want by asking me questions.”

He tightened his grip, and she stood on tiptoe to ease the pressure.

“To distract you.” Her voice rose a fraction. “To change the direction of things. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to enjoy this. If I obey, you have no excuse to act.”

Her eyes, aimed at him through strands of hair that had fallen over them, almost convinced him
that she was right.

“You expected me to stop you?”

“I thought you might.”

“You risked a humiliation
that you didn’t have to? Wasn’t that sloppy of you?”

“Humiliation. Why do you say that?”

“I doubt going down on clients is one of your favorite things.”

“My favorite thing is what I see in your eyes when I take you beyond yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because I go with you. Because you let me in.” Her body was arched away from him, but he held her fast. He wanted to believe her, but he also wanted to keep her like this, to watch her breathe and struggle. Her nipples, erect and perfectly formed, invited him to touch. This wasn’t the way he wanted it, though. Not like this, while she was still directing him, while he was the tempted one.

“So it was all me. You served me the whole time, is that it? Even when you resist, it’s for my convenience.” He laughed and released her.

Something sparked in her expression, a flicker of interest or insight. Then she melted into the same predatory aura from when she had sunk to her knees in the gallery and moved toward him, lips parted. He put a hand to her sternum to push her back, to keep her mouth from touching his, and she began to laugh, a rising spiral of sound that, if this were a movie, he would stop by slapping her face.

Instead, Simon led her by the elbow through the gallery as he threw open doors: her office, the tiled bathroom, the foyer, and the room with the red velvet walls. Still laughing, Leah stumbled and gasped. His skin itched, and his stomach burned with
a cold certainty he tried to ignore—oily and cruel.

“What are you looking for?” she asked, another gale of mirth pent behind her lips.

“Your bedroom. Where is it?”

She fell silent. If she had asked him, “Why do you want to go there?” he would not have had an answer. But she pointed at the mural behind the wooden throne. There, camouflaged by images of the depraved forest full of demons, was a door. It clicked on a spring when he pushed it, and beyond
was a hallway with two doors and a spiral staircase.

He drew her along, her chains clinking
. Filmy drapes streamed from the open windows. Dresses on padded hangers lay spread out on the bed, an antique hulk hung with tied-back curtains and covered with a gold-embroidered spread, armfuls of red and gold pillows. The bedroom walls were studded with tribal masks and black-and-white photographs—all nudes, from anthropological images to modern portraits. Shoes and shoe boxes covered the floor, and two wineglasses, one marked with lipstick half-moons, stood among scattered cosmetics and cheap silver rings on the vanity. A pair of panties lay discarded on the closet floor among the shoe trees and garment bags.

Two glasses. Faith had been with her. The thick carpet clung to his bare feet. He stood in the middle of a ring of sepia faces on the walls, an intruder with the electricity of sex still tingling on his skin. He should not be thinking of Faith at this moment, but he still felt her from that blind and bound hour just past. Her mouth on his neck, the way her hands tightened on his shoulders as her hips moved. The room rubbed up against him like a cat: the blankets and sheets muffled under the rich quilt, the faceted perfume bottles, the vased purple lilacs whose sweetness mixed with the bitter tissue paper in the shoeboxes to form the scent of Leah’s private world.

Simon picked a white T-shirt off the back of the vanity chair, tossed it on the bed.

“Must have been some party I interrupted.” He thought of the shout, the slammed door that he had heard outside in the yard on his way in. “What were you two doing?”

“Girl talk. Borrowing clothes.” Leah’s wrist chain rattled as she relaxed her arms, let them hang from the leather cuffs.

“Sounds idyllic. What’d you talk about?”

She stared at the far wall, and her eyes darkened.

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll find my own answers.” Simon walked the perimeter of the room, past the control panel for the security system, tiny lights labeled
Ground floor windows 1 through 4
,
Front
,
Back
, and
Basement 1 and 2
; past the closet and bathroom. Outside, a neighbor in shorts with black socks and dress shoes pushed a hand mower. Simon closed the windows. Two books, philosophy and poetry, lay on the nightstand next to a cluster of fat red candles and a telephone, which he unplugged and put in the next room.

When he came back
, he opened the nightstand drawer: dental dams, condoms, blindfolds, a collar. Whom were these things for, Angel or Faith? Both? Simon jerked the lamp cord out of the wall. As he stepped away, his hand brushed the quilt, scratchy with metallic threads. This was where she slept. He gripped the fabric and pulled, the nested bedclothes underneath heavy with resistance. He yanked again and uncovered a field of white sheets, hotel-smooth. How had he not felt it fully the first time, when she slid to the floor in the gallery, her hands reaching for his belt buckle? He saw her again, replicated, an army of Leahs sinking to their knees, a bouquet of mouths poised to open for him. Her hair silky between his palms, her head moving.

If he wanted her that way, if he had managed to even get here, then he must not be a slave at heart after all. That was something, at least.

His hand slid down the carved wooden bedpost. A bolt jutted out near the floor, hung with heavy silver links. A long chain with a padded shackle lay coiled under the dust ruffle, long enough to allow a captive to roam as far as the bathroom and almost to the door. The perfect setup for keeping someone here for hours, even days.

Leah stood where he had left her, staring at the wall
as if he weren’t there. But it was all an act—he was more real here in this room than she. He had taken it, and by taking it, changed it. He could never erase that fact. Simon dug in the nightstand drawer and handed her a notepad and pen.

“
Write a note to Faith and one to Angel. Tell them you’re giving them the week off, and they can go stay somewhere else for a few days.”

She took the pen
. Neither her posture nor her face revealed her thoughts.

Simon
pocketed the notes and held up the shackle. “Is the key to this on the ring you gave me?”

She nodded, and he
closed the hinged iron ring around her ankle.

Simon emptied the dresser drawers, turned the lamps over looking for hidden keys,
and went to the closet. Inside, cedar and lavender scented the air, which was muffled and hushed with the weight of huddled garments. Skirts, dresses, and blouses of every color and texture hung like the skins of dead animals, waiting, stored with memories of the last time she wore them. Shoes and boots stood lined up primly on the floor, and lingerie slithered in silken folds in built-in teak drawers, sorted by color. Exotic costumes of leather, latex, and rubber lolled from their hangers.

Growing up, he had kept all his clothes on pegs on the wall; the bedroom closets in his father’s house were filled with books, canned food, broken appliances.

For a moment he saw into her life: disciplined, sterile, and ordered. He imagined her browsing through the outfits to make her choice as the bath ran and the candles on the vanity flickered. Getting ready to go where? To another mistress’s house? To a slave’s?

What next? He had
not planned this far. But something about the idea of the bath running stayed with him. Something about browsing through a neatly displayed array of choices, his choice of all the questions to which he would now get answers.

He left the closet
, went into the bathroom, and turned on the bathtub faucet. As he turned, he caught sight of himself in the mirror: ripped shirt, dried trail of blood on his arm, dark-ringed eyes. People at home always said he had his mother’s eyes, but he never knew until now what they meant: unreadable irises, opaque with suspicion. What was he doing here, pawing through a white woman’s things?

White woman. That was something Tom would say. But it was Simon’s thought now, even though he could—and did—pass. “Are you Italian? Mexican?” girls asked him in college when he developed an olive-toned pallor from endless hours indoors. Even Lebanese would have been fine with them—just not Indian. Not someone doomed to be a drunk, a crazy, a tragic failure reduced to homelessness and begging.

In the next room, water crashed and fell in the tub. Simon thought of the boxes of his things that he had shipped that after-noon, loaded on a truck bound for the airport, bumping along with plastic-bagged magazines and sacks of mail. Something loomed up inside him, goading. It wanted to see what he was made of.

“Why’d you and Paul sabotage my film?” he said. “Why’d you play that game with me and Faith?”

Leah focused her gaze and stirred, as if he had just entered the room. “What do you mean?”

Even though as he moved it registered in his brain that she looked genuinely confused, the next thing he knew
, he had lowered her into the marble bathtub, her hair wrapped around his fist and her head pulled back. The water leaped and rebounded against the sudden motion, sloshed against the rim. Hand-painted tiles, green and deep blue, a cursive, floral design. Thick rounds of handmade soap and azure tubes of bath products lined a glass shelf. From the corner of her eye, Leah watched him as he turned off the tap. She supported her weight on her elbows, shoulders and head tilted back so that she could breathe.

Stop this
. You know you have to stop right now.

Instead he said, “The longer you stall, the longer this is going to take. I have a
lot of questions. Like why you didn’t try to fight me when you had the chance.”

She closed her eyes
for a moment before she spoke. A bead of water quivered in the hollow of her collarbone like a raindrop on a leaf. “I don’t know.”

Liar
, said the thing inside his skull.

What now? Apologize and let her go, leave to wait and hope that someday someone would explain to him how he
had lost everything?

“Let’s go back then. Which one of you came to me alone today?” he asked.

“Please don’t ask me.”

“
Which one?”

The ends of her hair, dark with water, flowed and coiled around his wrist. Her every breath rocked and tipped the surface of the water.

“I’m Faith’s guardian,” she said. “I can’t answer for her, so I can’t tell you.”

“What kind of crap is that? That’s not an answer.” A pair of stockings hung from a ledge above them, the wadded toes crumpled and dark. She remained silent. “I know who it was. Did you send Faith to me the other week too? Was that your idea?”

“Yes.”

“
Why?”

“I
thought I’d lost you . . . after that time with Angel. That I’d gone too far.” She shifted, her bound wrists pulling their chains taut.

“
And that was supposed to bring me back?”