tickling, and of course you are wise; you have guessed that I do not have Cancer on my fingers but Claws, talons like a cat’s but bigger, a little more dull than wood brads but good for tearing. And my teeth are a sham over metal. Why are men so afraid of the awful intimacies of hate? Remember, I don’t threaten. I don’t play. I always carry firearms. The truly violent are never without them. I could have drilled him between the eyes, but if I do that, I all but leave my signature on him; it’s freakier and funnier to make it look as if a wolf did it. Better to think his Puli went mad and attacked him. I raked him gaily on the neck and chin and when he embraced me in rage, sank my claws into his back. You have to build up the fingers surgically so they’ll take the strain. A certain squeamishness prevents me from using my teeth in front of witnesses—the best way to silence an enemy is to bite out his larynx. Forgive me! I dug the hardened cuticle into his neck but he sprang away; he tried a kick but I wasn’t there (I told you they rely too much on their strength); he got hold of my arm but I broke the hold and spun him off, adding with my nifty, weighted shoe one another bruise on his limping kidneys. Ha ha! He fell on me (you don’t feel injuries in my state) and I reached around and scored him under the ear, letting him spray urgently into the rug; he will stagger to his feet and fall, he will plunge fountainy to the ground; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down dead. Jael. Clean and satisfied from head to foot. Boss is pumping his life out into the carpet. All very quiet, oddly enough. Three J’s in a terrible state, to judge from their huddling together; I can’t read their hidden faces. Will Natalie come in? Will she faint? Will she say, “I’m glad to be rid of him, the old bastard?” Who will own her now? You get monomaniacal on adrenalin. “Come on, come on!” I whispered to the J’s, herding them toward the door, buzzing and humming, the stuff still singing in my blood. The stupidity of it. The asininity of it. I love it, I love it. “Come on!” I said. Pushing them out the door, into the corridor, out and into the elevator, past the fish swimming in the aquatic wall, evil, svelte manta-rays and groupers six feet long. Poor fish! No business done today, God damn, but once they get that way there’s no doing business with them; you have to kill them anyway, might as well have fun. There’s no standing those non-humans at all, at all. Jeannie is calm. Joanna is ashamed of me. Janet is weeping. But how do you expect me to stand for this all month? How do you expect me to stand it all year? Week after week? For twenty years? Little male voice says: It Was Her Menstrual Period. Perfect explanation! Raging hormonal imbalances. His ghostly voice: “You did it because you had your period. Bad girl.” Oh beware of unclean vessels who have that dirty menstrual period and Who Will Not Play! I shooed the J’s into the Boss-man’s car—Anna had long ago disappeared—skeleton keys out of my invisible suit with its invisible pocket, opened the lock, fired the car, started up. I’ll go on Automatic as soon as we get to the highway; Boss’s I.D. will carry us to the border. No trouble from there.
“You all right?” I asked the J’s, laughing, laughing, laughing. I’m drunk still. They said Yes in varying musical keys. The Strong One’s voice is pitched higher than that of The Weak One (who believes she’s an alto), and The Little One is highest of all. Yes, yes, they said, frightened. Yes, yes, yes.
“Now I did not get that contract signed,” I said, putting on my sham teeth over my steel ones. “God damn, God damn, God damn!” (Don’t drive on adrenalin; you’ll probably have an accident.)
“When does it leave you?” That’s The Strong One: smart girl. “An hour, half an hour,” I said. “When we get home.”
“Home?” (from the back)
“Yes. My home.” Every time I do this I burn up a little life. I shorten my time. I’m at the effusive stage now, so I bit my lip, to keep quiet.
After a long silence—“Was that necessary?” from The Weak One.
Still hurt, still able to be hurt by them! Amazing. You’d think my skin would get thicker, but it doesn’t. We’re all of us still flat on our backs. The boot’s on our neck while we slowly, ever so slowly, gather the power and the money and the resources into our own hands. While they play war games. I put the car on Autom. and sat back, chilly with the reaction. My heartbeat’s quieting. Breath slower.
Was it necessary? (Nobody says this.) You could have turned him off—
There is a pretense on my own side that we are too refined to care, too compassionate for revenge—this is bullshit, I tell the idealists. “Being with Men,” they say, “has changed you.”
Eating it year in and year out.
“Look, was it necessary?” says one of the J’s, addressing to me the serious urgency of womankind’s eternal quest for love, the ages-long effort to heal the wounds of the sick soul, the infinite, caring compassion of the female saint.
An over-familiar mode! Dawn comes up over the waste land, bringing into existence the boulders and pebbles battered long ago by bombs, dawn gilding with its pale possibilities even the Crazy Womb, the Ball-breaking Bitch, the Fanged Killer Lady.
“I don’t give a damn whether it was necessary or not,” I said.
“I liked it.”
IX
It takes four hours to cross the Atlantic, three to shuttle to a different latitude. Waking up in a Vermont autumn morning, inside the glass cab, while all around us the maples and sugar maples wheel slowly out of the fog. Only this part of the world can produce such color. We whispered at a walking pace through wet fires. Electric vehicles are quiet, too; we heard the drip of water from the leaves. When the house saw us, my old round lollipop- on-a-stick, it lit up from floor to top, and as we came nearer broadcast the Second Brandenburg through the black, wet tree-trunks and the fiery leaves, a delicate attention I allow myself and my guests from time to time. Shouting brilliantly through the wet woods—I prefer the unearthy purity of the electronic scoring. One approaches the house from the side, where it looks almost flat on its central column—only a little convex, really—it doesn’t squat down for you on chicken legs like Baba Yaga’s hut, but lets down from above a great, coiling, metal-mesh road like a tongue (or so it seems; in reality it’s only a winding staircase). Inside you find yourself a corridor away from the main room; no use wasting heat.
Davy was there. The most beautiful man in the world. Our approach had given him time to make drinks for us—which the J’s took from his tray, staring at him but he wasn’t embarrassed—curled up most unwaiterlike at my feet with his hands around his knees and proceeded to laugh at the right places in the conversation (he takes his cues from my face).
The main room is panelled in yellow wood with a carpet you can sleep on (brown) and a long, glassed-in porch from which we watch the blizzards sweep by five months out of the year. I like purely visual weather. It’s warm enough for Davy to go around naked most of the time, my ice lad in a cloud of gold hair and nudity, never so much a part of my home as when he sits on the rug with his back against a russet or vermilion chair (we mimic autumn here), his drowned blue eyes fixed on the winter sunset outside, his hair” turned to ash, the muscles of his back and thighs stirring a little. The house hangs oddments from the ceiling; found objects, mobiles, can openers, red balls, bunches of wild grass, and Davy plays with them.
I showed the Js around: the books, the microfilm viewer in the library in touch with our regional library miles away, the storage spaces in the walls, the various staircases, the bathrooms molded of glass fiber and put together from two pieces, the mattresses stored in the walls of the guest rooms, and the conservatory (near the central core, to make use of the heat) where Davy comes and mimics wonder, watching the lights shine on my orchids, my palmettos, my bougainvillea, my whole little mess of tropical plants. I even have a glassed-in space for cacti. There are outside plantings where in season you can find mountain laurel, a tangled maze of rhododendron, scattered irises that look like an expensive and antique cross between insects and lingerie—but these are under snow now. I even have an electrified fence, inherited from my predecessor, that encloses the whole estate to keep out the deer and occasionally kills trees which take the mild climate around the house a little too much for granted.
I let the J’s peep into the kitchen, which is an armchair with controls like a 707’s, but not the place where I store my tools and from which I have access to the central core when House has indigestion. That’s dirty and you need to know what you’re doing. I showed them Screen, which keeps me in touch with my neighbors, the nearest of
