“Yeah,” he encouraged, holding up another bill. A five this time. She danced closer, close enough for him to slide the five into her pocket, but he shook his head.
“Lean over. And don’t use your hands.”
It took her a moment to figure out what he wanted, but it was simple enough. She bent over and used her upper arms to bring her breasts together, creating a soft niche for Hickey to stuff his five-dollar bill into. He immediately made use of it.
“Now the jeans.”
She unzipped the jeans but left them on. As she spun slowly, he took another slug of Wild Turkey and stared mesmerized at her chest. The effect was almost comical, one that Karen had never really understood. Men stared at naked breasts the way LSD trippers stared at the sun, as though mammary glands held the secret of the universe. As Hickey stared, she saw that his dazed fascination gave her a certain amount of control. Instead of removing her jeans, she licked her forefinger and brought it down to her right nipple, then traced a small circle around it. When it responded, Hickey’s nostrils flared and his eyes widened. He took another long pull from the bottle.
She raised both arms and began swaying to “Hold Me Now” by the Thompson Twins. She thought she must look like a go-go girl in one of those hanging cages from the sixties. Hickey was nodding in time to the beat, gripping the bottle by its neck and drinking from it every few seconds. His eyes looked darker than before, if that was possible. No longer bottomless pools, but flat disks of slate. Shark’s eyes. No knowledge in them, only hunger. A vast, insatiable appetite.
“Come on,” he rasped. “Let’s see the goods.”
She didn’t want to take off her jeans. The vulnerability she had felt without them was dehumanizing. But she couldn’t afford to make him truly angry. Then she would lose any semblance of control. She had to keep him drinking, convince him that she was going along. She let the jeans ride down her hips, then lifted her knees one at a time and kicked her feet out of them. That she managed this without falling on her butt was a miracle in itself- she hoped not the only one of the night.
That thought evaporated as Hickey slid down in the chair so that his legs were fully extended, his hips and thighs stretched like a bridge between the chair and ottoman. “Stand over me,” he said. “Then you sit down and dance. That’s called a sofa dance.”
Sofa dance?
“Hurry,” he said insistently. “Right here.”
He meant his lap. Karen was nearing the limit of her tolerance. She stepped over his outstretched legs but did not sit down. She could no longer dance in any real sense, only sway from the waist up. But Hickey seemed content for the moment.
“Turn around,” he said.
She thought she detected a slur in his pronunciation. She stepped over his legs, then back over them so that she was facing his feet. She had never been more thankful for underwear. She focused on the “L” of light that was her almost-closed bathroom door.
“Damn,” Hickey said softly. “That’s a work of art. Bend over. Slow.”
Karen shut her eyes and bent toward his feet, knowing she was fully exposed now, terrified that he would touch her.
He did. But with paper, not his hand. Another bill. This one slid between her panties and her skin. She shuddered with disgust, thinking of where that money might have been, who might have touched it. Then she realized that her disgust was not even a fraction of what she would feel when he violated her.
“Turn around again.”
She obeyed. To her horror, Hickey had laid a hand in his lap and begun rubbing himself. Her stomach turned a somersault. She was thankful she hadn’t eaten in a while. Or perhaps it would be better if she had. She’d heard that vomiting was a good defense against rape, but she’d never understood how you could do it at the right time. If Hickey touched her now, though, she just might manage it.
“That was a twenty,” he said. “Twenty for the panties.”
She couldn’t do it. She could not remove the last barrier between herself and total nakedness. “We’ve got all night,” she said. “Don’t rush it.”
“Sit!” Hickey commanded, as he would a dog.
Karen tried to steel herself to obey, but it was no use.
He took hold of her hips with powerful hands and yanked her down against him. In the first instant of contact, a torrent of emotions raced through her. Terror first, because now it was real. Whiskey wasn’t going to keep this man from performing. Nothing was, except death, and if she somehow managed to kill him, Abby would die, too. With the terror came dazed disbelief. She had not felt any other man but Will in that place for fifteen years, and only two before him. To be touched there by someone she had not chosen was an affront to her most secret self. But most deeply she felt guilt, for allowing it to go this far. Even though logic told her she had no alternative, her insecurity said there had to be one. One that a braver or more moral woman would have seen without thought. But the only alternative she could see was death for Abby.
As Hickey groaned in rapture, a cold certainty crystallized in Karen’s brain. No matter what Nicole Kidman had done in the movies, she could not endure being raped by this man. By any man. For any reason. Her answer to the eternal female question-would I fight or submit?-was an unequivocal fight.
Hickey groaned again, and this time the sound pierced her to the marrow. Will sometimes made exactly the same sound during sex. The thought that there was any connection between her marital lovemaking and what was happening now nauseated her. But of course there was. Will was as human as any man, and he wanted sex all the time. Much more often than she did, anyway. And not just lovemaking. He wanted physical sex, an outlet for his drives and frustrations, and she resented that. There had been a time, just before and after their marriage, when she had felt a powerful urge to make love. But that had slowly faded with time. Not that she loved him less. But after she was forced to give up medical school, her desire flatlined. She couldn’t voice the reason to Will, but the fact was that submitting to his sexual desires seemed the ultimate expression of the terrible sacrifice she had made. Because it was sex, at bottom, that had made that sacrifice necessary. And just because Will got an erection every morning and night was no reason she had to wait at his beck and call like some nineteenth-century hausfrau-
“Get up!” Hickey ordered. “That’s enough fore-play.”
She practically leaped off him and retreated toward the TV cabinet.
He thrust himself to his feet and carried the bottle of Wild Turkey to the bedside table. Then he walked back toward her, pulling off his Polo shirt as he came, revealing a pale, wiry torso. Only his neck was tanned, and his arms from the elbows down. A farmer’s tan, her father had called it. When he reached for his belt, Karen looked at the carpet.
“Watch,” he said, his voice full of pride.
She took a deep breath and looked up as Hickey’s khakis hit the floor. A tingling numbness began to creep outward from some place deep within her. The act would be bad, she knew, but the anticipation was worse. The knowing-while you were still intact-that absolute suffering was inevitable. That the place you had protected all your life was about to be violated. That no help would come. There was only Hickey. And Abby. Abby hanging over her head like a sword, enforcing every command he gave.
The numbness continued to spread through her, and the temptation was to let it come, like a freezing person giving in to the cold. Let it penetrate into my bones, she thought. Into my heart and soul, so that whatever happens will be unfelt, a crime committed upon another person, an insensate body. A cadaver. And yet, if she let the numbness that far in, could she ever get it all out again?
As Hickey stared at her with his stupid schoolboy grin, something stirred deep within her. Not quite a thought, but the seed of one. A tiny spark of awareness, smoldering and darkly feminine. A ruthless, chthonic knowledge of male vulnerability.
Her moment would come.
EIGHT
