Gerald's Game Read online

  Her name is Goodwife Burlingame and she's being punished for hurting her husband, she thought. They're punishing the Goodwife because they can't get hold of the one who's really responsible for hurting him ... the one who sounds like my old college roommate.

  But was hurting the right word? Was it not likely that she was now sharing this bedroom with a dead man? Was it not also likely that, dog or no dog, the Notch Bay end of the lake was entirely deserted? That if she started to scream, she would be answered only by the loon? Only that and nothing more?

  It was mostly that thought, with its strange echo of Poe's "The Raven," that brought her to a sudden realization of just what was going on here, what she had gotten herself into, and full-fledged, mindless terror suddenly fell on her. For twenty seconds or so (if asked how long that panic-attack lasted, she would have guessed at least three minutes and probably closer to five) she was totally in its grip. A thin rod of rational consciousness remained deep inside her, but it was helpless--only a dismayed spectator watching the woman writhe on the bed with her hair flying as she whipped her head from side to side in a gesture of negation, hearing her hoarse, frightened screams.

  A deep, glassy pain at the base of her neck, just above the place where her left shoulder started, put a stop to it. It was a muscle-cramp, a bad one. Moaning, Jessie let her head fall back against the separated mahogany slats which formed the headboard of the bed. The muscle she had strained was frozen in a strenuous flexed position, and it felt as hard as a rock. The fact that her exertion had forced pins and needles of feeling all the way down her forearms to the palms of her hands meant little next to that terrible pain, and she found that leaning back against the headboard was only putting more pressure on the overstrained muscle.

  Moving instinctively, without any thought at all, Jessie planted her heels against the coverlet, raised her buttocks, and shoved with her feet. Her elbows bent and the pressure on her shoulders and upper arms eased. A moment later the Charley horse in her deltoid muscle began to let go. She let out her breath in a long, harsh sigh of relief.

  The wind--it had progressed quite a bit beyond the breeze stage, she noticed--gusted outside, sighing through the pines on the slope between the house and the lake. Just off the kitchen (which was in another universe as far as Jessie was concerned), the door she and Gerald had neglected to pull shut banged against the swollen jamb: one time, two time, three time, four. These were the only sounds; only these and nothing more. The dog had quit barking, at least for the time being, and the chainsaw had quit roaring. Even the loon seemed to be on its coffee-break.

  The image of a lake-loon taking a coffee-break, maybe floating in the water-cooler and chatting up a few of the lady loons, caused a dusty croaking sound in her throat. Under less unpleasant circumstances, that sound might have been termed a chuckle. It dissolved the last of her panic, leaving her still afraid but at least in charge of her thoughts and actions once more. It also left her with an unpleasant metallic taste on her tongue.

  That's adrenaline, toots, or whatever glandular secretion your body dumps when you sprout claws and start climbing the walls. If anyone ever asks you what panic is, now you can tell them: an emotional blank spot that leaves you feeling as if you've been sucking on a mouthful of pennies.

  Her forearms were buzzing, and the tingles of sensation had at last spread into her fingers as well. Jessie rolled her hands open and closed several times, wincing as she did so. She could hear the faint sound of the handcuff chains rattling against the bedposts and took a moment to wonder if she and Gerald had been mad --it certainly seemed so now, although she had no doubt that thousands of people all over the world played similar games each and every day. She had read that there were even sexual free spirits who hanged themselves in their closets and then beat off as the blood-supply to their brains slowly decreased to nothing. Such news only served to increase her belief that men were not so much gifted with penises as cursed with them.

  But if it had been only a game (only that and nothing more), why had Gerald felt it necessary to buy real handcuffs? That was sort of an interesting question, wasn't it?

  Maybe, but I don't think it's the really important question just now, Jessie, do you? Ruth Neary asked from inside her head. It was really quite amazing how many different tracks the human mind could work on at the same time. On one of these she now found herself wondering what had become of Ruth, whom she had last seen ten years ago. It had been at least three years since Jessie had heard from her. The last communication had been a postcard showing a young man in an ornate red velvet suit with a ruff at the neck. The young man's mouth was open, and his long tongue had been protruding suggestively. SOME DAY MY PRINCE WILL TONGUE, the card had said. New Age wit, Jessie remembered thinking at the time. The Victorians had Anthony Trollope; the Lost Generation had H. L. Mencken; we got stuck with dirty greeting cards and bumper-sticker witticisms like AS A MATTER OF FACT, I DO OWN THE ROAD.

  The card had borne a blurry Arizona postmark and the information that Ruth had joined a lesbian commune. Jessie hadn't been terribly surprised at the news; had even mused that perhaps her old friend, who could be wildly irritating and surprisingly, wistfully sweet (sometimes in the same breath) had finally found the hole on the great gameboard of life which had been drilled to accept her own oddly shaped peg.

  She had put Ruth's card in the top left drawer of her desk, the one where she kept various odd lots of correspondence which would probably never be answered, and that had been the last time she'd thought about her old roomie until now--Ruth Neary, who lusted to own a Harley-Davidson barn-burner but who had never been able to master any standard transmission, even the one on Jessie's tame old Ford Pinto; Ruth, who often got lost on the UNH campus even after three years there; Ruth, who always cried when she forgot she was cooking something on the hotplate and burned it to a crisp. She did that last so often it was really a miracle she had never set their room--or the whole dorm--on fire. How odd that the confident no-bullshit voice in her head should turn out to be Ruth's.

  The dog began to bark again. It sounded no closer, but it sounded no farther away, either. Its owner wasn't hunting birds, that was for sure; no hunter would have anything to do with such a canine blabbermouth. And if dog and master were out for a simple afternoon walk, how come the barks had been coming from the same place for the last five minutes or so?

  Because you were right before, her mind whispered. There is no master. This voice wasn't Ruth's or Goodwife Burlingame's, and it certainly wasn't what she thought of as her own voice (whatever that was); it was very young and very scared. And, like Ruth's voice, it was strangely familiar. It's just a stray, out here on its own. It won't help you, Jessie. It won't help us.

  But that was maybe too gloomy an assessment. After all, she didn't know the dog was a stray, did she? Not for sure. And until she did, she refused to believe it. "If you don't like it, sue me," she said in a low, hoarse voice.

  Meanwhile, there was the question of Gerald. In her panic and subsequent pain, he had kind of slipped her mind.

  "Gerald?" Her voice still sounded dusty, not really there. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Gerald!"

  Nothing. Zilch. No response at all.

  That doesn't mean he's dead, though, so keep your fur on, woman--don't go off on another rip.

  She was keeping her fur on, thank you very much, and she had no intention whatever of going off on another rip. All the same, she felt a deep, welling dismay in her vitals, a feeling that was like some awful homesickness. Gerald's lack of response didn't mean he was dead, that was true, but it did mean he was unconscious, at the very least.

  And probably dead, Ruth Neary added. I don't want to piss on your parade, Jess--really--but you don't hear him breathing, do you? I mean, you usually can hear unconscious people breathing; they take these big snory, blubbery snatches of air, don't they?

  "How the fuck would I know?" she said, but that was stupid. She knew because she had been an enthusiastic ca
ndystriper for most of her high school years, and it didn't take long for you to get a pretty good fix on what dead sounded like; it sounded like nothing at all. Ruth had known all about the time she had spent in Portland City Hospital--what Jessie herself had sometimes called The Bedpan Years--but this voice would have known it even if Ruth hadn't, because this voice wasn't Ruth; this voice was her. She had to keep reminding herself of that, because this voice was so weirdly its own self.

  Like the voices you heard before, the young voice murmured. The voices you heard after the dark day.

  But she didn't want to think about that. Never wanted to think about that. Didn't she have enough problems already?

  But Ruth's voice was right: unconscious people--especially those who'd gotten unconscious as the result of a good hard rap on the noggin--usually did snore. Which meant ...

  "He's probably dead," she said in her dusty voice. "Okay, yeah."

  She leaned to the left, moving carefully, mindful of the muscle which had cramped so painfully at the base of her neck on that side. She had not quite reached the farthest extent of the chain binding her right wrist when she saw one pink, chubby arm and half of one hand--the last two fingers, actually. It was his right hand; she knew this because there was no wedding ring on his third finger. She could see the white crescents of his nails. Gerald had always been very vain about his hands and his nails. She had never realized just how vain until right now. It was funny how little you saw, sometimes. How little you saw even after you thought you'd seen it all.

  I suppose, but I'll tell you one thing, sweetie: right now you can pull down the shades, because I don't want to see any more. No, not one thing more. But refusing to see was a luxury in which she could not, at least for the time being, indulge.

  Continuing to move with exaggerated care, babying her neck and shoulder, Jessie slid as far to the left as the chain would allow. It wasn't much--another two or three inches, tops--but it fattened the angle enough for her to see part of Gerald's upper arm, part of his right shoulder, and a tiny bit of his head. She wasn't sure, but she thought she could also see tiny beads of blood at the edges of his thinning hair. She supposed it was at least technically possible that this last was just imagination. She hoped so.

  "Gerald?" she whispered. "Gerald, can you hear me? Please say you can."

  No answer. No movement. She could feel that deep homesick dismay again, welling and welling, like an unstanched wound.

  "Gerald?" she whispered again.

  Why are you whispering? He's dead. The man who once surprised you with a weekend trip to Aruba--Aruba, of all places--and once wore your alligator shoes on his ears at a New Year's Eve party ... that man is dead. So just why in the hell are you whispering?

  "Gerald!" This time she screamed his name. "Gerald, wake up!"

  The sound of her own screaming voice almost sent her into another panicky, convulsive interlude, and the scariest part wasn't Gerald's continued failure to move or respond; it was the realization that the panic was still there, still right there, restlessly circling her conscious mind as patiently as a predator might circle the guttering campfire of a woman who has somehow wandered away from her friends and gotten lost in the deep, dark fastnesses of the woods.

  You're not lost, Goodwife Burlingame said, but Jessie did not trust that voice. Its control sounded bogus, its rationality only paint-deep. You know just where you are.

  Yes, she did. She was at the end of a twisting, rutted camp road which split off from Bay Lane two miles south of here. The camp road had been an aisle of fallen red and yellow leaves over which she and Gerald had driven, and those leaves were mute testimony to the fact that this spur, leading to the Notch Bay end of Kashwakamak, had been used little or not at all in the three weeks since the leaves had first begun to turn and then to fall. This end of the lake was almost exclusively the domain of summer people, and for all Jessie knew, the spur might not have been used since Labor Day. It was a total of five miles, first along the spur and then along Bay Lane, before one came out on Route 117, where there were a few year-round homes.

  I'm out here alone, my husband is lying dead on the floor, and I'm handcuffed to the bed. I can scream until I turn blue and it won't do me any good; no one's going to hear. The guy with the chainsaw is probably the closest, and he's at least four miles away. He might even be on the other side of the lake. The dog would probably hear me, but the dog is almost certainly a stray. Gerald's dead, and that's a shame--I never meant to kill him, if that's what I did--but at least it was relatively quick for him. It won't be quick for me; if no one in Portland starts to worry about us, and there's no real reason why anyone should, at least for awhile ...

  She shouldn't be thinking this way; it brought the panic-thing closer. If she didn't get her mind out of this rut, she would soon see the panic-thing's stupid, terrified eyes. No, she absolutely shouldn't be thinking this way. The bitch of it was, once you got started, it was very hard to stop again.

  But maybe it's what you deserve--the hectoring, feverish voice of Goody Burlingame suddenly spoke up. Maybe it is. Because you did kill him, Jessie. You can't kid yourself about that, because I won't let you. I'm sure he wasn't in very good shape, and I'm sure it would have happened sooner or later, anyway--a heart attack at the office, or maybe in the turnpike passing lane on his way home some night, him with a cigarette in his hand, trying to light it, and a big ten-wheeler behind him, honking for him to get the hell back over into the right-hand lane and make some room. But you couldn't wait for sooner or later, could you? Oh no, not you, not Tom Mahout's good little girl Jessie. You couldn't just lie there and let him shoot his squirt, could you? Cosmo Girl Jessie Burlingame says "No man chains me down. " You had to kick him in the guts and the nuts, didn't you? And you had to do it while his thermostat was already well over the red line. Let's cut to the chase, dear: you murdered him. So maybe you deserve to be right here, handcuffed to this bed. Maybe--

  "Oh, that is such bullshit," she said. It was an inexpressible relief to hear that other voice--Ruth's voice --come out of her mouth. She sometimes (well ... maybe often would be closer to the truth) hated the Goodwife voice; hated it and feared it. It was often foolish and flighty, she recognized that, but it was also so strong, so hard to say no to.

  Goody was always eager to assure her she had bought the wrong dress, or that she had chosen the wrong caterer for the end-of-summer party Gerald threw each year for the other partners in the firm and their wives (except it was really Jessie who threw it; Gerald was just the guy who stood around and said aw shucks and took all the credit). Goody was the one who always insisted she had to lose five pounds. That voice wouldn't let up even if her ribs were showing. Never mind your ribs! it screamed in tones of self-righteous horror. Look at your tits, old girl! And if they aren't enough to make you barf a keg, look at your thighs!

  "Such bullshit," she said, trying to make it even stronger, but now she heard a minute shake in her voice, and that wasn't so good. Not so good at all. "He knew I was serious ... he knew it. So whose fault does that make it?"

  But was that really true? In a way it was--she had seen him deciding to reject what he saw in her face and heard in her voice because it would spoil the game. But in another way--a much more fundamental way--she knew it wasn't true at all, because Gerald hadn't taken her seriously about much of anything during the last ten or twelve years of their life together. He had made what almost amounted to a second career out of not hearing what she said unless it was about meals or where they were supposed to be at such-and-such a time on such-and-such a night (so don't forget, Gerald). The only other exceptions to the general Rules of Ear were unfriendly remarks about his weight or his drinking. He heard the things she had to say on these subjects, and didn't like them, but they were dismissible as part of some mythic natural order: fish gotta swim, bird gotta fly, wife gotta nag.

  So what, exactly, had she expected from this man? For him to say, Yes, dear, I will free you at once, and by the way, thank
s for raising my consciousness?

  Yes; she suspected some naive part of her, some untouched and dewy-eyed little-girl part, had expected just that.

  The chainsaw, which had been snarling and ripping away again for quite some time, suddenly fell silent. Dog, loon, and even the wind had also fallen silent, at least temporarily, and the quiet felt as thick and as palpable as ten years of undisturbed dust in an empty house. She could hear no car or truck engine, not even a distant one. And now the voice which spoke belonged to no one but herself. Oh my God, it said. Oh my God, I am all alone out here. I am all alone.

  3

  Jessie closed her eyes tightly. Six years ago she had spent an abortive five-month period in counselling, not telling Gerald because she knew he would be sarcastic ... and probably worried about what beans she might be spilling. She had stated her problem as stress, and Nora Callighan, her therapist, had taught her a simple relaxation technique.

  Most people associate counting to ten with Donald Duck trying to keep his temper, Nora had said, but what a ten-count really does is give you a chance to re-set all your emotional dials ... and anybody who doesn't need an emotional re-set at least once a day has probably got problems a lot more serious than yours or mine.

  This voice was also clear--clear enough to raise a small, wistful smile on her face.

  I liked Nora. I liked her a lot.