Gerald’s Game

miles, maybe. Closer by, out on the main body of Kashwakamak Lake, a loon tardy in starting its annual run south lifted its crazed cry into the blue October air. Closer still, somewhere here on the north shore, a dog barked. It was an ugly, ratcheting sound, but Jessie found it oddly comforting. It meant that someone else was up here, midweek in October or no. Otherwise there was just the sound of the door, loose as an old tooth in a rotted gum, slapping at the swollen jamb. She felt that if she had to listen to that for long, it would drive her crazy.

Gerald, now naked save for his spectacles, knelt on the bed and began crawling up toward her. His eyes were still gleaming.

She had an idea it was that gleam which had kept her playing the game long after her initial curiosity had been satisfied. It had been years since she’d seen that much heat in Gerald’s gaze when he looked at her. She wasn’t bad-looking-she’d managed to keep the weight off, and still had most of her figure-but Gerald’s interest in her had waned just the same. She had an idea that the booze was partly to blame for that-he drank a hell of a lot more now than when they’d first been married-but she knew the booze wasn’t all of it. What was the old saw about familiarity breeding contempt? That wasn’t supposed to hold true for men and women in love, at least according to the Romantic poets she’d read in English Lit 101, but in the years since college she had discovered there were certain facts of life about which John Keats and Percy Shelley had never written. But of course, they had both died a lot younger than she and Gerald were now.

And all of that didn’t matter much right here and right now. What maybe did was that she had gone on with the game longer than she had really wanted to because she had liked that hot little gleam in Gerald’s eyes. It made her feel young and pretty and desirable. But…

… but if you really thought it was you he was seeing when he gotthat look in his eye, you were misled, toots. Or maybe you misled yourself.And maybe now you have to decide-really, really decide-if you intendto continue putting up with this humiliation. Because isn’t that prettymuch how you feel? Humiliated?

She sighed. Yes. It pretty much was.

“Gerald, I do mean it.” She spoke louder now, and for the first time the gleam in his eyes flickered a little. Good. He could hear her after all, it seemed. So maybe things were still okay. Not great, it had been a long time since things had been what you could call great, but okay. Then the gleam reappeared, and a moment later the idiot grin followed.

“I’ll teach you, me proud beauty,” he said. He actually said that, pronouncing beauty the way the landlord in a bad Victorian melodrama might say it.

Let him do it, then. Just let him do it and it will be done.

This was a voice she was much more familiar with, and she intended to follow its advice. She didn’t know if Gloria Steinem would approve and didn’t care; the advice had the attractiveness of the completely practical. Let him do it and it would be done. QED.

Then his hand-his soft, short-fingered hand, its flesh as pink as that which capped his penis-reached out and grasped her breast, and something inside her suddenly popped like an overstrained tendon. She bucked her hips and back sharply upward, flinging his hand off.

“Quit it, Gerald. Unlock these stupid handcuffs and let me up. This stopped being fun around last March, while there was still snow on the ground. I don’t feet sexy; I feel ridiculous.”

This time he heard her all the way down. She could see it in the way the gleam in his eyes went out all at once, like candle flames in a strong gust of wind. She guessed that the two words which had finally gotten through to him were stupid and ridiculous. He had been a fat kid with thick glasses, a kid who hadn’t had a date until he was eighteen-the year after he went on a strict diet and began to work out in an effort to strangle the engirdling flab before it could strangle him. By the time he was a sophomore in college, Gerald’s life was what he described as “more or less under control” (as if life-his life, anyway-were a bucking bronco he had been ordered to tame), but she knew his high school years had been a horror show that had left him with a deep legacy of contempt for himself and suspicion of others.

His success as a corporate lawyer (and marriage to her; she believed that had also played a part, perhaps even the crucial one) had further restored his confidence and self-respect, but she supposed that some nightmares never completely ended. In a deep part of his mind, the bullies were still giving Gerald wedgies in study-hall, still laughing at Gerald’s inability to do anything but girlie-pushups in phys ed, and there were words-stupid and ridiculous, for instance-that brought all that back as if high school had been yesterday… or so she suspected. Psychologists could be incredibly stupid about many things, almost wilfully stupid, it often seemed to her, but about the horrible persistence of some memories she thought they were bang-on. Some memories battened onto a person’s mind like evil leeches, and certain words stupid and ridiculous, for example-could bring them instantly back to squirming, feverish life.

She waited to feel a pang of shame at hitting below the belt like this and was pleased-or maybe it was relief she felt-when no pang came. I guess maybe I’m just tired of pretending, she thought, and this idea led to another: she might have her own sexual agenda, and if she did, this business with the handcuffs was definitely not on it. They made her feel demeaned. The whole idea made her feel demeaned. Oh, a certain uneasy excitement had accompanied the first few experiments-the ones with the scarves-and on a couple of occasions she’d had multiple orgasms, and that was a rarity for her. All the same, there had been side-effects she didn’t care for, and that feeling of being somehow demeaned was only one of them. She’d had her own nightmares following each of those early versions of Gerald’s game. She awoke from them sweaty and gasping, her hands thrust deeply into the fork of her crotch and rolled into tight little balls. She only remembered one of these dreams, and that memory was distant, blurred: she had been playing croquet without any clothes on, and all at once the sun had gone out.

Never mind all that, Jessie; those are things you can consider anotherday. Right now the only important thing is getting him to let you loose.

Yes. Because this wasn’t their game; this game was all his. She had gone on playing it simply because Gerald wanted her to. And that was no longer good enough.

The loon voiced its lonely cry out on the lake again. Gerald’s dopey grin of anticipation had been replaced by a look of sulky displeasure. You broke my toy, you bitch, that look said.

Jessie found herself remembering the last time she’d gotten a good look at that expression. In August Gerald had come to her with a glossy brochure, had pointed out what he wanted, and she had said yes, of course he could buy a Porsche if he wanted a Porsche, they could certainly afford a Porsche, but she thought he might do better to buy a membership in the Forest Avenue Health Club, as he had been threatening to do for the past two years. “You don’t have a Porsche body just now,” she had said, knowing she wasn’t being very diplomatic but feeling that this really wasn’t the time for diplomacy. Also, he had exasperated her to the point where she hadn’t cared a whole hell of a lot for his feelings. This had been happening more and more frequently to her lately, and it dismayed her, but she didn’t know what to do about it.

“Just what is that supposed to mean?” he had asked stiffly. She didn’t bother to answer; she had learned that when Gerald asked such questions, they were almost always rhetorical. The important message lay in the simple subtext: You’re upsetting me, Jessie. You’renot playing the game.

But on that occasion-perhaps in an unknowing tune-up for this one-she had elected to ignore the subtext and answer the question.

“It means that you’re still going to be forty-six this winter whether you own a Porsche or not, Gerald… and you’re still going to be thirty pounds overweight.” Cruel, yes, but she could have been downright gratuitous; could have passed on the image which had flashed before her eyes when she had looked at the photograph of the sports car on the front of the glossy brochure Gerald had handed her. In that blink of an instant she had seen a chubby little kid with a pink face and a widow’s peak stuck in the innertube he’d brought to the old swimming hole.

Gerald had snatched the brochure out of her hand and had stalked away without another word. The subject of the Porsche had not been raised since… but she had often seen it in his resentful We Are Not Amused stare.

She was seeing an even hotter version of that stare right now.

“You said it sounded like fun. Those were your exact words: “It sounds like fun.'”

Had she said that? She supposed she had. But it had been a mistake. A little goof, that was all, a little slip on the old banana peel. Sure. But how did you tell your husband that when he had his lower lip pooched out like Baby Huey getting ready to do a tantrum?

She didn’t know, so she dropped her gaze… and saw something she didn’t like at all. Gerald’s version of Mr Happy hadn’t wilted a bit. Apparently Mr Happy hadn’t heard about the change of plans.

“Gerald, I just don’t-”

“… feel like it? Well, that’s a hell of a note, isn’t it? I took the whole day off work. And if we spend the night, that means tomorrow morning off, as well.” He brooded over this for a moment, and then repeated: “You said it sounded like fun.”

She began to fan out her excuses like a tired old poker-hand (Yes, but now I have a headache; Yes, but I’m having these really shittypre-menstrual cramps; Yes, but I’m a woman and therefore entitled tochange my mind; Yes, but now that we’re actually out here in the BigLonely you frighten me, you had beautiful brute of a man, you), the lies that fed either his misconceptions or his ego (the two were frequently interchangeable), but before she could pick a card, any card, the new voice spoke up. It was the first time it had spoken out loud, and Jessie was fascinated to find that it sounded the same in the air as it did inside her head: strong, dry, decisive, in control.

It also sounded curiously familiar.

“You’re right-I guess I did say that, but what really sounded like fun was breaking away with you the way we used to before you got your name up on the door with the rest of the type-A’s. I thought maybe we could bounce the bedsprings a little, then sit on the deck and dig the quiet. Maybe play some Scrabble after the sun went down. Is that an actionable offense, Gerald? What do you think? Tell me, because I really want to know.” “But you said-”

For the last five minutes she had been telling him in various ways that she wanted out of these goddam handcuffs, and he still hadn’t let her out of them. Her impatience boiled over into fury. “My God, Gerald, this stopped being fun for me almost as soon as we started, and if you weren’t as thick as a brick, you would have realized it!”

“Your mouth. Your smart, sarcastic mouth. Sometimes I get so tired of-”

“Gerald, when you get your head really set on something, sweet and low doesn’t come close to reaching you. And whose fault is that?”

“I don’t like you when you’re like this, Jessie. When you’re like this I don’t like you a bit.”

This was going from bad to worse to horrible, and the scariest part was how fast it was happening. Suddenly she felt very tired, and a line from an old Paul Simon song occurred to her: “I don’t want no part of this crazy love.” Right on, Paul. You may be short, but you ain’t dumb.

“I know you don’t. And it’s okay that you don’t, because right now the subject is these handcuffs, not how much you do or don’t like me when I tell you I’ve changed my mind about something. I want out of these cuffs. Are you hearing me?”

No, she realized with dawning dismay. He really wasn’t. Gerald was still one turn back.

“You are just so goddamned inconsistent, so goddamned sarcastic. I love you, Jess, but I hate the goddam lip on you. I always have.” He wiped the palm of his left hand across his pouting rosebud of a mouth and then looked sadly at her-poor, put-upon Gerald, saddled with a woman who had gotten him out here in the forest primeval and then reneged on her sexual obligations. Poor, put upon Gerald, who showed no sign whatever of getting the handcuff keys off the bureau by the bathroom door.

Her unease had changed into something else-while her back was turned, as it were. It had become a mixture of anger and fear she could remember feeling only once before. When she was twelve or so, her brother Will had goosed her at a birthday party. All her friends had seen, and they had all laughed. Har-har, preety