“ ‘Not really’? What does that mean?”
“I’ve never been attracted to a man myself, but I might notice that a man is or is not generally attractive.”
“You sound awfully normal, Preston.”
“I always thought I was, but—”
“How about sexual fantasies? And don’t tell me you never had any.
That’s too normal to be normal.”
“Some.”
Ah, he’d touched a nerve. “If you’d rather not go there, Preston—”
“We were married a long time,” he says. “I was faithful. Sometimes, though, when we made love —”
All the Flowers Are Dying
53
“You entertained fantasies.”
“Yes.”
“That’s hardly unusual. Other women?”
“Yes. Women I knew, women I just . . . imagined.”
“Did you ever discuss your fantasies with your wife?”
“Of course not. I couldn’t do that.”
“Were there men in the fantasies?”
“No. Well, sometimes there were men present. Sometimes the fantasy was a party, all our friends, and people would take off their clothes, and it would be sort of a free-for-all.”
“Would you have liked to transform that fantasy into reality?”
“If you knew the people,” he says, “you’d know how inconceivable that is. It was hard enough to make them act like that in my own mind.”
“And you never had sex with another man in these fantasies?” He shakes his head. “There was nothing like that. The closest was sharing a woman with another man.”
“And you never did that outside of the world of your imagination?”
“No, of course not.”
“Never suggested it to your wife?”
“Jesus, no. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, but in fantasy it was exciting.”
“Any children in those fantasies?”
“None.”
“Neither girls nor boys?”
“No.”
“Any violence? Any rape, any torture?”
“No.”
“Any forcing a woman to do something she didn’t want to do?”
“Never. They didn’t have to be forced. They all wanted to do everything. That’s one way you could tell it was a fantasy.” They join in laughter, perhaps more than the line calls for.
He says, “Preston? Have you been listening to yourself? It’s inconceivable that you could have done what they said you did.”
“I’d always known as much, but—well, I’m relieved, Arne. You had me worried there, or perhaps I should say that I had myself worried.” He 54
Lawrence Block
manages a smile. “Of course the bad news,” he says, “is that the day after tomorrow they’re still going to give me the needle.”
“It’ll be around noon,” Applewhite says. “I always assumed midnight. I mean all my life, when I thought of executions, which wasn’t something I thought about often, I must say, I thought they happened in the middle of the night. Somebody throws a switch and lights go dim all over the state. I must have seen a movie at an impressionable age. And I seem to remember newsreel footage outside a penitentiary, with one crowd there to protest the death penalty and another bunch having tailgate parties to celebrate that some poor bastard’s getting the shock of his life. You can’t have parties like that in the middle of the day. You need a dark sky so everyone can get a good view of the fireworks.” The words are bitter, the tone lacking in affect. Interesting.
“The judge who sentenced me never said anything about the time, just the date. The particulars are up to the warden, and I guess Humphries doesn’t want to keep anybody up late.”
“Have they told you what to expect?”
“More than once. They don’t want any surprises. They’ll come here sometime between eleven and eleven-thirty to collect me. They’ll walk me to the chamber and strap me to the gurney. There’ll be a physician in attendance, among others, and there’ll be some spectators on the other side of a glass wall. I’m not sure what the purpose of the glass wall is. Not soundproofing, because there’s going to be a microphone, so they can hear my last words. I
