The Serialist Page 10

  Then again, perhaps she wouldn’t mind at all. Where Morgan Chase had been reluctant to open up, putting me in the embarrassing position of reluctant seducer, Marie opened up all too easily, embarrassing me even more with her instant intimacy and putting me in the place of the equally reluctant seduced. She was not beautiful, or particularly graceful or charming or bright. But she had the attractiveness of youth, of eager young flesh at its ripest, and she was certainly a good deal cuter than either of her homicidal poster girls: the 250-pound Martha Beck, female half (or three-quarters) of the Honeymoon Killers, whose execution had to be delayed because she was too fat for the electric chair, or Myra Hindley, of the Moors Murderers, whose dyed blond hair and Nazi chic made her an arch-ironic sex symbol but who, plain, mannish-looking, and with an IQ of 107, would have been utterly unremarkable without her notoriety. Nevertheless it was clearly these couples who formed her ideal of doomed, high romantic love: outsiders beyond good and evil or, depending on your point of view, stunted runts so weak they could only lift themselves up by preying on children and old women.

  This is where the clever reader stops me and says, But aren’t you, harmless Harry, feeding on these very fantasies? Why else would your books be crammed so full of gratuitous you-know-what? Why needs must you be so explicit? Well, I’ll tell you. First and foremost, it’s a living, and as any waiter or stripper can attest, one man’s gratuity is another girl’s rent. But there’s another more important, if paradoxical reason: I suspect the push toward explicitness actually originates not in my pulpy lizard brain but in the high art cortex itself. Let me explain.

  To those of you who read for dark thrills and secret chills: Don’t worry, it’s all coming. And I don’t judge you. And to those squeamish souls who, sighting blood on the page, flinch and look away, I say, You’re not the only ones, believe me. If you think it’s hard to read that stuff, try writing it with one hand over your eyes. But it’s also right there that the sleeping poet in me stirs and licks his chops. Because if there’s one commandment I’d preach to every scribbler sharpening a pencil for the hunt, it’s this: when you hit a nerve in the reader, or better yet yourself, write harder.

  32

  Interview Transcript: Marie Fontaine, 4/22/09

  MF: Am I afraid to be in love with a man who they say has murdered? Not at all. He’s beyond your judgment. After all, they want to kill him, don’t they? And not even in person, but at a distance. At least he did it with his own hand. If he did it, I mean. To me it’s the ultimate erotic act. Death and eroticism are linked. It’s a thin line though most people are too afraid. Great sex takes us to the edge of the abyss and orgasm pushes us over. It’s like a taste of death. Sex with a killer doesn’t scare me. It turns me on.

  HB: Really?

  MF: Yes. Does that shock you?

  HB: No.

  MF: I want to fuck him.

  HB: Right.

  MF: In the ass.

  HB: Right.

  MF: I mean him in my ass.

  HB: Got it. And if he asked you to help kill someone? To help him lure someone into a trap or hold them down, you’d do it?

  MF: Of course. I’d do anything.

  HB: You’d commit murder yourself?

  MF: Yes. Yes, I would.

  HB: Anyone? A friend? A family member?

  MF: Of course. What difference does it make? Those are just abstract concepts. He is my only true family. He is friend, brother, lover. We create our own morality, like Nietzsche. That’s why you can’t understand me or him. We’re outside your morality. Society’s values. Consumerism. My supposed family just sit there and watch TV. They obey and just chew the slop they feed them like cattle, so who’s the prisoner, if you really think about it? What about Iraq? If I wake up and see through it all, then I’m free, even if they lock me up. See what I mean? He’s free. Because he set himself free in his mind. Job, house, school, family, this shitty town in this shitty state. I despise it. But you have only to awaken from this too-troubled dream. Then nothing is real. And everything is permitted. Do what thou wilt is the whole of my law.

  HB: Crowley.

  MF: Yes. You’ve read him?

  HB: Sure. A long time ago. When I was your age, maybe. A teenager. Are you in school?

  MF: No. I’m twenty-two.

  HB: You work at a job?

  MF: Office work. Nonsecretarial.

  HB: You follow Crowley?

  MF: I read him often.

  HB: You’re a satanist?

  MF: Maybe. Maybe not.

  HB: What about a child? Could you murder a child with your own hands if Darian asked you to?

  MF: Let me try to put this in terms you can understand. So you can see how depraved I am. Want to know my ultimate fantasy?

  HB: Sure.

  MF: I want to see him kill someone, disembowel them, and then fuck me in the blood.

  HB: Really? You’d really do it?

  MF: It turns me on. The blood, the sweat, like a sacrificial ordeal. Ritualized. I get aroused just thinking about it. I’ll show you, if you want. I don’t care.

  HB: That’s cool. I believe you.

  MF: Here. Look up my skirt. Go ahead. I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks.

  HB: Actually I have to get going . . .

  MF: See? Go ahead and look. I don’t care.

  33

  I got out of there as soon as I could. Gentle reader, what is the etiquette in such a case? Even the ol’ Slut Whisperer’s not sure. Like the time I got caught in an improv comedy club or front row at my cousin’s bris, I stayed grimly till the end of Marie’s performance, smiling like wood as she rooted under her skirt, but I averted my burning eyes from the finale. Not that she was so evil or vile. Not at all. Despite her best efforts, she was normal enough. That’s what made it unbearable. Trapped in her life, in her family. No friends probably. Lousy job. Hating how she looked. The oddly shaped, awkward shy girl. If she’d been smarter or richer, she would have escaped into art school. But as it was she saw no way out, besides Darian.

  I also have to admit that if she stirred no erotic interest, she did arouse the sadist in me. I wanted to give her a rude awakening. I had always hated that poseur, wannabe evil bullshit. I wanted to show her true suffering: child abuse, political torture, cancer, genocide, the real horrors of the real world. I wanted to laugh in her face and spit on her pretentious little Satan. To tell her that her lover was vermin, semiliterate scum, and that even to him she was nothing, a joke. I wanted to rub her nose in shit.

  I didn’t, of course, though who knows, it might have done her some good. And as for trying to be kind or understanding—showing that I pitied her would’ve been truly cruel. What else did she have, alone in her room, except her evil dreams? So I left, letting her think I was shocked. I said a quick good-bye and hurried out, her big crude laugh chasing me from behind the door, and waited for my bus in the cold rather than stay any longer.

  On the bus I was forlorn. I sat behind the driver, forehead to the glass, and the brakes sighed and snorted. It was wet out and everything gleamed. Leaves jumped into the wind and pressed themselves to my window, as if sneaking a ride out of town. Beads of water stood like gooseflesh on the brightly finished cars. I saw toys, bikes, gnomes, an abandoned Rudolph toppled in the grass. A swing set dappled in rust. Black and green plastic garbage cans lined up at the curb. An umbrella lay gutted, showing its silver bones. Was everyone everywhere as unhappy as poor Marie and I? When we entered the tunnel, I leaned back and shut my eyes.

  By the time I got out to Queens I was in a truly foul mood, and when I walked by the flower shop and saw Morris, my J. Duke Johnson photo model, I stopped in to get cheered up. It turned out he’d had a fight with his boyfriend and was even grimmer than I.

  “Let’s go out for a drink or six,” Morris suggested. “I need to dull my senses.”

  “OK, where? Jacqui’s?” This was the corner bar.

  “God no. No place around here, I don’t want to have to discuss anyth
ing with anyone I know. And no place gay either. No place with anyone who I care what they think.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I think I know a place.”

  “No one we know will be there?”

  “Highly doubtful.”

  “And homo-free?”

  “That I can almost guarantee.”

  34

  RSVP’s, the strip club where Daniella worked, was somewhere out by the airport. I called her cell and a few minutes later I got a text. Yes, she was dancing that night. She’d leave my name plus one and some drink tickets at the door. Morris was thrilled.

  “I want a real trashy blonde with big tits to straddle me and rub them in my face,” he declared as we rode over in a cab. “But huge, ginormous tits. With big, pink nipples.”

  The building was a concrete bunker: no windows and a neon sign, long and low on an industrial block (forlorn!) with orange streetlamps and the occasional plane roaring overhead. We pushed through a turnstile, from the brightly lit night into darkness, and waited for our eyes to adjust.

  At first, Morris seemed stunned by all the female flesh, but he warmed right up once he got a few drinks in him. He was ordering saki, or “sah-kay,” as he called it, and by the second little bottle he was on his feet, throwing money on the runway and tucking it into G-strings like a drunken salaryman. Even so, no one was about to mistake him for a frat boy. He howled, “You go, girl,” at the dancers, demanded to know where a black girl got her extensions, and when invited to smack a bottom, cooed, “Damn. You do Pilates, bitch?” They were thrilled, of course, and our booth quickly became a locus of attention, with two or three girls bouncing and giggling around us, including a big, boobular blonde.

  “Are these real?” he asked, weighing and prodding her breasts like they were capons he was thinking of stuffing.

  “Honey, haven’t you ever felt a fake tit? Some of your boys must have them.”

  “Yes, but these are much better. The nipple is so stiff.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re tugging on it.”

  A nubile young redhead squeezed in beside them. “Mine are real. Feel them.” Her breasts were small and pert and freckled. Morris gave a thoughtful squeeze. “Tender,” he decided. The girls squealed as he asked them each to rub a breast on his cheek.

  Then I noticed that we had another visitor. A huge black guy, almost as big as Morris, dressed in fatigues and sporting an afro and goatee, was standing over our table holding hands with a tiny Asian girl in her bra and panties.

  “Yo, excuse me,” he said.

  “Yes?” I asked, wondering if Morris was as useless in a fight as I am.

  He pointed at Morris. “That dude there. He’s J. Duke Johnson, the author, isn’t he?”

  “No. But I know what you mean. It’s a weird resemblance.”

  “Ha. Got it. Keeping it cool, right?” He shook my hand in his huge mitt, then reached across me and tapped Morris. “Excuse me, Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson!”

  Morris looked around, smiling, as if also curiously searching for Mr. Johnson. Our visitor leaned into him, blocking the stage. The girls stepped back and covered their boobs. “I just want to say I’m a big fan of your work. It’s an inspiration.”

  “Well, thanks . . . ,” Morris said vaguely, confused but drunkenly pleased to meet a fan of flower arranging. “It’s all about shape and color.”

  I kicked him under the table.

  “He’s a fan of your books,” I added. “Mordechai Jones.”

  “Right. Right! Well, thank you so much. That’s sweet.” Morris shook his hand.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Certainly,” Morris snapped. “Hot sah-kay!”

  The new guy ordered a Courvoisier for himself, and I asked for a Coke.

  “Can’t drink,” I said, nervously. “I’m his bodyguard.” We all laughed at that one, I the loudest.

  “Why don’t you and your little friend join us?” Morris suggested, and they squeezed in. I was now between the two men, with the girls along the perimeter.

  “This here’s May Ling,” the guy said.

  “Well, aren’t you cute?” Morris said, and shook her hand.

  “And I’m RX738.”

  “Sorry?” Morris asked.

  “RX738.” He took out a couple of business cards and gave them to us. Sure enough, they said RX738, along with a phone number and email address.

  “Would you look at that?” Morris wondered.

  “I’m a DJ and producer,” he explained. “I do some rapping. And I build beats.”

  “Good for you.”

  “But it’s in my lyrics that you really influenced me the most.”

  “Why thank you. I love your hair. Like a whole revolutionary vibe.”

  “Exactly. That’s my tip. And I know that’s what Mordechai preaches. Black unity. Turn the guns from each other and aim them at the true enemy: Whitey. No offense,” he said to me.

  “That’s OK,” I said quickly and sipped my Coke.

  “You know what would be fucking tight?” he asked.

  “Tell me.” Morris sipped his sake.

  “If you would rap on my record. Just swing by the studio and lay down a track.”

  “Sure!” Morris said. “I’d love to.”

  I saw my life flashing before my eyes, and it ended with Morris in a soundbooth, trying to rap. I whispered in his ear, “Shut the fuck up. You’re going to get us killed.”

  But Morris wasn’t listening. His eyes were on the stage. “Look at her,” he muttered.

  It was Daniella. I had almost missed her. Her song was “Tainted Love” and she was hanging upside down from the pole. Legs wrapped like the doubled snakes on the doctor’s staff, long blond hair trailing through the lights, she floated there above us, turning slowly, eyes shut, as if dancing for herself alone, then slithered down to the filthy stage and crawled to the men in the loosened ties and wedding rings who held out money like bait.

  “Go, you hot bitch,” Morris yelled, splashing sake.

  “Hell yes,” RX738 concurred.

  Daniella peered in our direction, shielding her eyes from the glare. She smiled and waved. I waved back.

  “RX!” she called. “RX!”

  Fifteen minutes later, Dani was happily seated on RX’s lap, sipping tequila, while the Asian girl held his hand in both of hers, stroking it, and the blonde and the redhead cuddled with Morris and sipped champagne. I sat in the middle again, with my Coke, trying not to gawk at Dani’s mostly naked body. She was drawn from all long lines—arms, legs, smooth belly—with high little breasts and the miraculous ass of a ballerina. She lit a Marlboro light and looked around to make sure no one was watching.

  “How’s the book coming?” she asked.

  “OK,” I said. “Slow. To be honest, it’s pretty depressing.”

  “You a writer too?” RX asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said, uneasily.

  “Too?” she asked. I shrugged. “He’s interviewing Darian Clay,” she told him. “He’s going to find out the truth about my sister.”

  “Fuck! Really? That’s some hard-core shit, for real.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’m not for real,” Morris blurted. “I’m bullshit.” While I wasn’t watching, he had floated across the line from ecstatic to morose. He stood abruptly, toppling the girls. Tears ran down his cheeks. “I’m not Doc Marten. I’m a florist. And I’m in love.”

  “What the fuck?” RX said.

  “Who’s Doc Marten?” Dani asked.

  “Duke,” I said. “Duke, sit down. You’re drunk, Duke.”

  Morris dropped heavily into the seat beside me. “Duke?” he asked, loudly. “Who’s Doc Marten then?”

  “You’re Duke Johnson,” I whispered frantically, sweat crawling down my back. “Doc Martens makes the boots.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, then bellowed, “Duke Johnson!”

  “What the fuck?” RX wonder
ed again. “You Duke Johnson or you ain’t?”

  “Ain’t! Ain’t!” Morris tried to stand again but I held him back. “I’m Morris. I own Heavenly Arrangements. I’m fucked up. Fucked! Up!”

  “But if you ain’t motherfucking Duke Johnson, who the fuck is?”

  “Him. Him.” Morris pointed at me. “He is.”

  “You?”

  “Afraid so,” I said, and held my breath.

  “He’s an awesome writer,” Dani said. “He wrote porn too.”

  “Damn. Duke Johnson’s white.” I waited for a blow, but he seemed more disheartened than angry.