Gerald's Game Read online

  Had she, Jessie, known that at the time? She was moderately astounded to find she couldn't exactly remember, any more than she could exactly remember why she had quit going to see Nora on Tuesday afternoons. She supposed that a bunch of stuff--Community Chest, the Court Street homeless shelter, maybe the new library fund drive--had just all come up at once. Shit Happens, as another piece of New Age vapidity passing for wisdom pointed out. Quitting had probably been for the best, anyway. If you didn't draw the line somewhere, therapy just went on and on, until you and your therapist doddered off to that great group encounter session in the sky together.

  Never mind_go ahead and do the count, starting with your toes. Do it just the way she taught you.

  Yes--why not?

  One is for feet, ten little toes, cute little piggies, all in a row.

  Except that eight were comically croggled and her great toes looked like the heads on a pair of ball-peen hammers.

  Two is for legs, lovely and long.

  Well, not that long--she was only five-seven, after all, and long-waisted--but Gerald had claimed they were still her best feature, at least in the old sex-appeal department. She had always been amused by this claim, which seemed to be perfectly sincere on his part. He had somehow missed her knees, which were as ugly as the knobs on an apple tree, and her chubby upper thighs.

  Three is my sex, what's right can't be wrong.

  Mildly cute--a little too cute, many might say--but not very illuminating. She raised her head a little, as if to look at the object in question, but her eyes remained closed. She didn't need her eyes to see it, anyway; she had been co-existing with that particular accessory for a long time. What lay between her hips was a triangle of ginger-colored, crinkly hair surrounding an unassuming slit with all the aesthetic beauty of a badly healed scar. This thing--this organ that was really little more than a deep fold of flesh cradled by crisscrossing belts of muscle--seemed to her an unlikely wellspring for myth, but it certainly held mythic status in the collective male mind; it was the magic vale, wasn't it? The corral where even the wildest unicorns were eventually penned?

  "Mother Macree, what bullshit," she said, smiling a little but not opening her eyes.

  Except it wasn't bullshit, not entirely. That slit was the object of every man's lust--the heterosexual ones, at least--but it was also frequently an object of their inexplicable scorn,. distrust, and hate. You didn't hear that dark anger in all their jokes, but it was present in enough of them, and in some it was right out front, raw as a sore: What's a woman? A lifie-support system for a cunt.

  Stop it, Jessie, Goodwife Burlingame ordered. Her voice was upset and disgusted. Stop it right now.

  That, Jessie decided, was a damned good idea, and she turned her mind back to Nora's ten-count. Four was for her hips (too wide), and five her belly (too thick). Six was her breasts, which she thought were her best feature--Gerald, she suspected, was a bit put off by the vague tracings of blue veins beneath their smoothly sloping curves; the breasts of the gatefold girls in his magazines did not show such hints of the plumbing beneath. The magazine girls didn't have tiny hairs growing out of their areolae, either.

  Seven was her too-wide shoulders, eight was her neck (which used to be good-looking but had grown decidedly chicken-y in the last few years), nine was her receding chin, and ten--

  Wait a minute! Wait just one goddammed minute here! the no-bullshit voice broke in furiously. What kind of dumb game is this?

  Jessie shut her eyes tighter, appalled by the depth of anger in that voice and frightened by its separateness. In its anger it didn't seem like a voice coming from the central taproot of her mind at all, but like a real interloper--an alien spirit that wanted to possess her the way the spirit of Pazuzu had possessed the little girl in The Exorcist.

  Don't want to answer that? Ruth Neary--alias Panzuzu--asked. Okay, maybe that one's too complicated. Let me make it really simple for you, Jess: who turned Nora Callighan's badly rhymed little relaxation litany into a mantra of self-hate?

  No one, she thought back meekly, and knew at once that the no-bullshit voice would never accept that, so she added: The Goodwife. It was her.

  No, it wasn't, Ruth's voice returned at once. She sounded disgusted at this half-assed effort to shift the blame. Goody's a little stupid and right now she's a lot scared, but she's a sweet enough thing at the bottom, and her intentions have always been good. The intentions of whoever re-edited Nora's list were actively evil, Jessie. Don't you see that? Don't you_

  "I don't see anything, because my eyes are closed," she said in a trembling, childish voice. She almost opened them, but something told her that was apt to make the situation worse instead of better.

  Who was the one, Jessie? Who taught you that you were ugly and worthless? Who picked out Gerald Burlingame as your soulmate and Prince Charming, probably years before you actually met him at that Republican Party mixer? Who decided he wasn't only what you needed but exactly what you deserved?

  With a tremendous effort, Jessie swept this voice--all the voices, she fervently hoped--out of her mind. She began the mantra again, this time speaking it aloud.

  "One is my toes, all in a row, two is my legs, lovely and long, three is my sex, what's right can't be wrong, four is my hips, curving and sweet, five is my stomach, where I store what I eat." She couldn't remember the rest of the rhymes (which was probably a mercy; she had a strong suspicion that Nora had whomped them up herself, probably with an eye toward publication in one of the soft and yearning self-help magazines which sat on the coffee-table in her waiting room) and so went on without them: "Six is my breasts, seven's my shoulders, eight's my neck ... "

  She paused to take a breath and was relieved to find her heartbeat had slowed from a gallop to a fast run.

  "... nine is my chin, and ten is my eyes. Eyes, open wide!" .

  She suited the action to the words and the bedroom jumped into bright existence around her, somehow new and--for the moment, at least--almost as delightful as it had been to her when she and Gerald had spent their first summer in this house. Back in 1979, a year which once had the ring of science fiction and now seemed impossibly antique.

  Jessie looked at the gray barnboard walls, the high white ceiling with its reflected shimmers from the lake, and the two big windows, one on either side of the bed. The one to her left looked west, giving a view of the deck, the sloping land beyond it, and the heartbreaking bright blue of the lake. The one on her right provided a less romantic vista--the driveway and her gray dowager of a Mercedes, now eight years old and beginning to show the first small speckles of rust along the rocker-panels.

  Directly across the room she saw the framed batik butterfly hanging on the wall over the dresser, and remembered with a superstitious lack of surprise that it had been a thirtieth-birthday present from Ruth. She couldn't see the tiny signature stitched in red thread from over here, but she knew it was there: Neary, '83. Another science-fiction year.

  Not far from the butterfly (and clashing like mad, although she had never quite summoned enough nerve to point this out to her husband), Gerald's Alpha Gamma Rho beer-stein hung from a chrome peg. Rho wasn't a very bright star in the fraternity universe--the other frat-rats used to call it Alpha Grab A Hoe--but Gerald wore the pin with a perverse sort of pride and kept the stein on the wall and drank the first beer of the summer out of it each year when they came up here in June. It was the sort of ceremony that had sometimes made her wonder, long before today's festivities, if she had been mentally competent when she married Gerald.

  Somebody should have put a stop to it, she thought drearily. Somebody really should have, because just look how it turned out.

  In the chair on the other side of the bathroom door, she could see the saucy little culotte skirt and the sleeveless blouse she had worn on this unseasonably warm fall day; her bra hung on the bathroom doorknob. And lying across the bedspread and her legs, turning the tiny soft hairs on her upper thighs to golden wires, was a bright band of a
fternoon sunlight. Not the square of light that lay almost dead center on the bedspread at one o'clock and not the rectangle which lay on it at two; this was a wide band that would soon narrow to a stripe, and although a power outage had buggered the readout of the digital clock-radio on the dresser (it flashed 12:00 A.M. over and over, as relentless as a neon bar-sign), the band of light told her it was going on four o'clock. Before long, the stripe would start to slide off the bed and she would see shadows in the corners and under the little table over by the wall. And as the stripe became a string, first slipping across the floor and then climbing up the far wall, fading as it went, those shadows would begin to creep out of their places and spread across the room like inkstains, eating the light as they grew. The sun was westering; in another hour, an hour and a half at most, it would be going down; forty minutes or so after that, it would be dark.

  This thought didn't cause panic--at least not yet--but it did lay a membrane of gloom over her mind and a dank atmosphere of dread over her heart. She saw herself lying here, handcuffed to the bed with Gerald dead on the floor beside and below her; saw them lying here in the dark long after the man with the chainsaw had gone back to his wife and kids and well-lighted home and the dog had wandered away and there was only that damned loon out there on the lake for company--only that and nothing more.

  Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Burlingame, spending one last long night together.

  Looking at the beer-stein and the batik butterfly, unlikely neighbors which could be tolerated only in a one-season-a-year house such as this one, Jessie thought that it was easy to reflect on the past and just as easy (although a lot less pleasant) to go wandering off into possible versions of the future. The really tough job seemed to be staying in the present, but she thought she'd better try her best to do it. This nasty situation was probably going to get a lot nastier if she didn't. She couldn't depend on some deus ex machina to get her out of the jam she was in, and that was a bummer, but if she succeeded in doing it herself, there would be a bonus: she'd be saved the embarrassment of lying here almost starkers while some sheriff's deputy unlocked her, asked what the hell had happened, and got a nice long look at the new widow's fair white body, all at the same time.

  There were two other things going on as well. She would have given a lot to push them away, even temporarily, but she couldn't. She needed to go to the bathroom, and she was thirsty. Right now the need to ship was stronger than the need to receive, but it was her desire for a drink of water that worried her. It wasn't t a big deal yet, but that would change if she wasn't able to shuck the cuffs and get to a faucet. It would change in ways she didn't like to think of.

  It'd be funny if I died of thirst two hundred yards from the ninth-biggest lake in Maine, she thought, and then she shook her head. This wasn't the ninth-biggest lake in Maine; what had she been thinking of? That was Dark Score Lake, the one where she and her parents and her brother and sister had gone all those years ago. Back before the voices. Back before--

  She cut that off. Hard. It had been a long time since she'd thought about Dark Score Lake, and she didn't intend to start now, handcuffs or no handcuffs. Better to think about being thirsty.

  What's to think about, toots? It's psychosomatic, that's all. You're thirsty because you know you can't get up and get a drink. It's as simple as that.

  But it wasn't. She'd had a fight with her husband, and the two swift kicks she'd dealt him had started a chain reaction which finally resulted in his death. She herself was suffering the after-effects of a major hormone-spill. The technical term for it was shock, and one of the commonest symptoms of shock was thirst.

  She should probably count herself lucky that her mouth was no drier than it was, at least so far, and--

  And maybe that's one thing I can do something about.

  Gerald was the quintessential creature of habit, and one of his habits was keeping a glass of water on his side of the shelf above the headboard of the bed. She twisted her head up and to the right and yes, there it was, a tall glass of water with a little cluster of melting ice-cubes floating on top. The glass was no doubt sitting on a coaster so it wouldn't leave a ring on the shelf--that was Gerald, so considerate about the little things. Beads of condensation stood out on the glass like sweat.

  Looking at these, Jessie felt her first pang of real thirst. It made her lick her lips. She slid to the right as far as the chain on the left handcuff would allow. This was only six inches, but it brought her onto Gerald's side of the bed. The movement also exposed several dark spots on the left side of the coverlet. She stared at these vacantly for several moments before remembering how Gerald had voided his bladder in his last agony. Then she quickly turned her eyes back to the glass of water, sitting up there on a round of cardboard which probably advertised some brand of yuppie suds, Beck's or Heineken being the most likely.

  She reached out and up, doing it slowly, willing her reach to be long enough. It wasn't. The tips of her fingers stopped three inches short of the glass. The pang of thirst--a slight tightening in the throat, a slight prickle on the tongue--came and went again.

  If no one comes or I can't think of a way to wiggle free by tomorrow morning, I won't even be able to look at that glass.

  This idea had about it a cold reasonableness that was terrifying in and of itself. But she wouldn't still be here tomorrow morning, that was the thing. The idea was totally ridiculous. Insane. Loopy. Not worth thinking about. It --

  Stop, the no-bullshit voice said. Just stop. And so she did.

  The thing she had to face was that the idea wasn't totally ridiculous. She refused to accept or even entertain the possibility that she could die here--that was loopy, of course--but she could be in for some long, uncomfortable hours if she didn't dust away the cobwebs on the old thinking machine and get it running.

  Long, uncomfortable... and maybe painful, the Goodwife said nervously. But the pain would be an act of atonement, wouldn't it? After all, you brought this on yourself. I hope I'm not being tiresome, but ifyou'djust let him shoot his squirt--

  "You are being tiresome, Goody," Jessie said. She couldn't remember if she had ever spoken out loud to one of the interior voices before. She wondered if she was going mad. She decided she didn't give much of a shit one way or the other, at least for the time being.

  Jessie closed her eyes again.

  4

  This time it wasn't her body she visualized in the darkness behind her lids but this whole room. Of course she was still the centerpiece, gosh, yes--Jessie Mahout Burlingame, still a shade under forty, still fairly trim at five-seven and a hundred and twenty-five pounds, gray eyes, brownish-red hair (she covered the gray that had begun to show up about five years ago with a glossy rinse and was fairly sure Gerald'had never known). Jessie Mahout Burlingame, who had gotten herself into this mess without quite knowing how or why. Jessie Mahout Burlingame, now presumably the widow of Gerald, still mother of no one, and tethered to this goddamned bed by two sets of police handcuffs.

  She made the imaging part of her mind zoom in on these last. A furrow of concentration appeared between her closed eyes.

  Four cuffs in all, each pair separated by six inches of rubber-sleeved steel chain, each with M-17--a serial number, she assumed--stamped into the steel of the lock-plate. She remembered Gerald's telling her, back when the game was new, that each cuff had a notched take-up arm, which made the cuff adjustable. It was also possible to shorten the chains until a prisoner's hands were jammed painfully together, wrist to wrist, but Gerald had allowed her the maximum length of chain.

  And why the hell xot? she thought now. After all, it was only a game... right, Gerald? Yet now her earlier question occurred to her, and she wondered again if it had ever really been just a game for Gerald.

  What's a woman? some other voice--a UFO voice--whispered softly from a well of darkness deep inside her. A life-support system for a cunt.

  Go away, Jessie thought. Go away, you're not helping.

  But the UFO voice d
eclined the order. Why does a woman have a mouth and a cunt? it asked instead. So she can piss and moan at the same time. Any other questions, little lady?

  No. Given the unsettlingly surreal quality of the answers, she had no other questions. She rotated her hands inside the cuffs. The scant flesh of her wrists dragged against the steel, making her wince, but the pain was minor and her hands turned easily enough. Gerald might or might not have believed that a woman's only purpose was to serve as a life-support system for a cunt, but he hadn't tightened the cuffs enough to hurt; she would have balked at that even before today, of course (or so she told herself, and none of the interior voices were mean enough to dispute her on the subject). Still, they were too tight to slip out of.

  Or were they?

  Jessie gave them an experimental tug. The cuffs slid up her wrists as her hands came down, and then the steel bracelets wedged firmly against the junctions of bone and cartilage where the wrists made their complex and marvellous alliances with her hands.

  She yanked harder. Now the pain was much more intense. She suddenly remembered the time Daddy had slammed the driver's-side door of their old Country Squire station wagon on Maddy's left hand, not knowing she was sliding out on his side for a change instead of on her own. How she had screamed! It had broken some bone-Jessie couldn't remember the name of it--but she did remember Maddy proudly showing off her soft cast and saying, "I also tore my posterior ligament." That had struck Jess and Will funny, because everyone knew that your posterior was the scientific name for your situpon. They had laughed, more in surprise than in scorn, but Maddy had gone storming off just the same, her face as dark as a thundercloud, to tell Mommy.

  Posterior ligament, she thought, deliberately applying more pressure in spite of the escalating pain. Posterior ligament and radio-ulnar something-or-other. Doesn't matter. If you can slip out of these cuffs, I think you better do it, toots, and let some doctor worry about putting Humpty back together again later on.

  Slowly, steadily, she increased the pressure, willing the handcuffs to slip down and off. If they would just go a little way--a quarter of an inch might do it, and a half was almost for sure--she would be past the bulkiest ridges of bone and would have more yielding tissue to deal with. Or so she hoped. There were bones in her thumbs, of course, but she would worry about them when and if the time came.