'You planned to bring her into the group from the moment you started dating her. You weren't interested in her as a girlfriend. You just wanted another body, right?' Gale shook his head. 'I want a straight answer.'
'Well, maybe that is what I had in mind.'
'Damn straight it was. From the start, right? But you never told her, did you? You waited till you thought she was ready. Then you proposed it, in a slippery kind of way like 'I know this great group of kids, they're really far-out, but I think you'll find them interesting.''
Greg lowered his eyes, resigned. 'Maybe that's what I did.' Then he looked up. 'But she was a big girl. And she went for it.
Believe me, she enjoyed it. The moment I broached it to her, her eyes lit up. Probably hard for you to hear this, but Jess liked sex. I mean she liked it. And there's nothing wrong with that.
We played safe, took precautions, used condoms. That's why we formed the group in the first place, so we could have some variety and still play safe. The whole idea was to make it fun. Not nasty like you're trying to make it seem.'
'Did I call it nasty?'
'It's your tone. Your whole approach. You want to make me feel like a worm.'
That much was true, but Janek wanted to define his own attitude. 'I don't think sex is nasty. But I think someone who uses the guise of romantic involvement to entice a girl into that kind of thing is fairly low-grade slime.'
Gale twisted in his chair. He couldn't take contempt. 'That's pretty close to what she told me, too,' he whispered. Janek was grateful to hear that. 'She dumped on you?' 'I already told you.' 'You must have resented her.' 'I'm human. Wouldn't you?' 'Resented her so much you stalked her, stabbed her, and after you killed her, you attacked the part of her that mocked you the most, that mocked your manhood.'
Gale jumped up. 'What're you talking about. What part of her?
Jesus!'
'The part you couldn't satisfy. The part that made you feel inadequate.'
'I don't understand.' He paused. 'You mean, my cock? Is that what you're talking about?' Janek smiled. 'Not your lousy little cock, asshole. A part of her. Jess!' Gale was still confused. 'What part of her?' 'You tell me.' 'Are you saying she was-that someone did some thing to her? God! I didn't know! It wasn't in the papers. Jesus!'
Gale sat back down, then began to sob. At first Janek was certain he was faking. But as the sobbing turned to gagging and then to heaving, he began to believe it was for real.
He helped Gale into the bathroom, then stood beside him as he fell to his knees and retched into the toilet.
'It's okay, son,' he said. 'Don't hold back. Let it out, let it out.'
When finally Gale was finished and turned to him with a grateful smile, Janek knew he had broken through. The bond was forged. The interrogator had become the friend. And now the truth would emerge.
'I was crazy about her, Janek. I swear to you.' they were back in the living room in the university chairs, but Janek sat farther away this time. No need to sit close and apply more stress. All he had to do now was listen with sympathy as Gale, impelled to talk, regaled him with his story.
'… you got it right, I recruited her. Just like I recruited the others. And it was always a kind of victory for me, too. I'd pick a girl out, walking across the quadrangle, or sitting alone in a lecture hall, or jogging, or laughing, or coming out of one of the dorms. I'd pick her because she looked good, had a great body, moved a certain way, had a well-packaged butt, her lips were sexy, or there was something, you know, about the way she laughed, her mouth, her tits, whatever. Then it became a game. Get her name. Get a date with her. Kiss her. Get her into the sack. After that it was usually pretty easy to lead them to the point where, you know, they thought it was their idea. Then came the victory part: putting the blindfold on them, leading them into the room, telling them to strip while everybody watched. We never told anybody who they were going to do it with. That was the game. Everyone liked it.
Everyone wore the blindfold. The guys, too. Including me. That was the fun of it, to wear the blindfold, to strip and stand there until the selected person came forward, stood before you till you could hardly stand it anymore, then slowly reached forward and made contact. Fear and anticipation and the idea you were on display. Wondering who the person was, trying to guess, but preferring not to know because it was easier to let yourself go if you didn't. Plenty of time later to find out who and laugh about who you thought it was. to perform like that, be the object of so much attention-I loved it. Everybody did.
Jess, too. You gotta believe me when I say this, Janek. She found it incredibly exciting.
'But, see, there was the problem, because when I watched her play with the others, a funny thing started to happen. It bothered me. I didn't like it. And I'd never felt like that before. So I said to her: 'Let's not do this anymore. Let's just go out as a couple.'
She laughed, called me jealous, made fun of me 'cause I couldn't take it. 'You got me into this, Greggy,' she said. 'You created a monster. Now you'll have to live with it.' 'Over the summer we went separate ways. I had a half-ass job at my father's brokerage firm and was out in the Hamptons most weekends. Jess was with her folks up on Martha's Vineyard, so we didn't see each other at all. I called her a lot. She never called me. The few times I managed to catch her home she told me she didn't feel like talking.
Then in August she went to Italy to some special fencing school. I wrote her, but she didn't answer. So okay, I figured when college started up again, we'd see each other and have a chance to talk. But come September she had a whole new attitude. Now all she wanted was to fence. She had ambitions, wanted to become an Olympic competitor. Her Italian coach had told her she had the potential for it but she'd have to give it everything she had. 'That's what I want,' she told me. 'I want to go all the way. I don't want to waste my energy anymore, dating people I don't care about or smoking pot and playing games with your chums.' 'Well, okay,' I said, 'that's fine.
I'll go along with that. Let's start over, just the two of us.' But that didn't interest her either.
'We had a big fight. She told me she didn't care if she ever saw me again. She called me all kinds of stuff. 'Shallow.' 'Spoiled.' 'No backbone.' 'No integrity.' 'User.' 'Pimp.' And she was right. Maybe that's why it hurt so much. She saw through me clearer than anyone ever had. She saw me for what I really am, which is just what you're looking at now, Janek. Yeah, I think you see me pretty much the way she did. As a jerk. A zero.' And with that he gave out with a forlorn little whelp and then a droopy self-pitying smile.
A nicely executed mea culpa, Janek thought, but he still had to be sure Gale hadn't gone after Jess in revenge.
'Okay, Greg. Pick yourself up. No law says you gotta be slime.
That's a choice you don't have to make.'
As Gale peered at him, searched his eyes for sympathy, suddenly Janek was sick of him. He was tired of people who made their confessions, then looked to him for solutions to their lives. What had he said to Monika that night in Venice? That he did what he did to gain wisdom, to comprehend the numerous varieties of human evil. But Greg Gale wasn't evil, at least not to a degree that mattered. He was smailtime-fuckedup-rich kid spoiled, and who gave a shit anyway? But somehow, some way this kid's life had touched Jess's, so no matter how sickening Janek found him, he still had to play out the string.
'You see yourself as decadent, but underneath you're pretty soft. '
In return, as he expected, Gale gave him the wann, grateful, amazed look-the one Janek always got at this point in an interrogation-the look that said: 'Thank you for understanding me so well.' 'So you were hurt by her. She was a great kid, but she was capable of hurting. You don't decide to become an Olympic-class fencer if you haven't got some pretty hard stuff inside. In my experience women are tougher than men. Easy to forget that when they cry. But they can ream you out and backwards when they feel like it. Isn't that the truth?'
Still caught up by Janek's magical insights, Greg nodded solemnly.
'You were angry. It's okay, Greg. Admit it.'
'Well, sure. Those things she said-'
'Made you feel like a wortn. Pretty hard to take a beating like that without getting mad about it, wanting to hit the girl back.'
Gale shrugged. 'I didn't want to hit her. All I wanted was for us to, you know, hold each other.'
'She rejected you, made you feel awful.'
'Yeah…' The spell was still holding; Gale was in a kind of dazed, suspended state.
'If she wouldn't go out with you, who would she go out with? You were jealous of what she did with the
