The Serialist Read online

  So when I met Morgan Chase, I was surprised and I wasn’t. Remember, I put in a lot of time pounding out the porn. I spent countless hours staring through a loupe at proof sheets that, however delusional, were indeed proof of one thing: someone will do anything. And when you add in the letters to the editor, the amateur photos, the drunken confidences at parties, you realize that perversity might reside in anybody, if anything in inverse proportion to outward appearance. Of course the postcolonial, postmodern, postfeminist of color yearns to be spanked by old white men, while the fiftyish WASP CEO longs to feel a three-hundred-pound black woman’s high heels stabbing his back. At best, there is a vague, even contrary, relationship between who we are variously as workers, citizens, friends, lovers, strangers and by ourselves. These different sides are like the many faces of a theoretical quantum coin, and though they may overlap or connect along a seam or even cross planes, they will never be seen all at once, at least not in this universe. And for the multidimensional coin to see itself: that’s a thought beyond the mind of even the High Lord Wizard of Zorg.

  23

  Transcript of a letter, dated September 6, 2008, from Morgan Chase [1] to Darian Clay, written in purple ink (from a fountain pen) on thick pale rose paper:

  Dear Sir,

  I know, lying here in my bed, while you lie in your cell, that we are together. I know, though the courts say you are a killer, that you are innocent. I know, though the newspapers say that you will be put to death in—I can’t say it, a very short time—I know you will be free, and that you will hold me in your arms, and then I will give myself to you, My Love, completely, totally, like no woman ever gave herself to a Man, no lover to her Beloved, no slave to her Master. Please, please, write to me. Tell me what You will do to me when that day comes. Tell me what You will have me do for You.

  Yours forever,

  Morgan

  24

  “Hi. I’m Harry Bloch.”

  “Morgan Chase.”

  “Thanks for seeing me like this.”

  “Of course, my pleasure. Thank you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Would you like some coffee or tea?”

  “I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

  “No trouble. I just brewed a fresh pot of coffee.”

  “OK then, sure, that sounds great.”

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “Just cream please, thanks.”

  “Unless you’d rather have tea?”

  “No, coffee is great.”

  “Be right back.”

  “OK.”

  I sat at the table. I had just arrived, but already I was socially exhausted and my face felt stiff from smiling. I wanted to slip out the door while she was in the kitchen. I felt that mixture of defeat and panic that we feel five minutes into what we know will be a disastrous first date, what the rabbit must feel just as he steps into the trap.

  But it was too late to run, so I took out my minirecorder and mic, my pad and pens, my manila file of notes, and got ready to work. Morgan Chase came back with two steaming mugs of coffee and set them down on two coasters. I thanked her and took an appreciative sip. I double-checked my notes.

  “OK,” I said, “let’s say you’re with Darian, and he has you tied to the bed—”

  She tremored so badly that her cup skipped and coffee jumped across the table at me. I pulled my belongings back from the spreading tide. There were a few starry spots on my files.

  “Sorry,” she blurted and ran away, returning with a sponge and paper towels. “I’m really very sorry,” she said again, violently swabbing the table. “I feel terrible about this.”

  “Don’t mention it.” It was her table, after all.

  “No, I mean, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do this.” Her eyes were on the sponge. “I just can’t.”

  I stood. “Please don’t be sorry,” I said, perhaps a bit too eagerly. “I understand completely. I don’t want to embarrass you.”

  “I feel terrible to have wasted your time.”

  “Not at all. This was a bad idea.”

  Immensely relieved, I stuffed my gear in my bag and hurried out, thumping down the creaky steps and out into the fresh air. No doubt Clay would fire me. The book would perish. Claire would be furious. I would stay broke and unloved. So what? I could breathe. Leaves were nearly open and the river smelled close, mingling with car fumes and the herbal sweetener of someone smoking pot.

  “Wait.” A hand at my elbow stopped me. It was she. “Please. Come back.”

  Her front door was open behind her. She was breathless and still holding a sponge in one hand.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded, just barely able to look me in the eye. I followed her back in, resignedly, as if I were the one being tormented. We sat back down at the table. She poured more coffee, slowly this time, and reset her mug, on its coaster, directly in front of her, halfway across her side of the table. I realized that the big white throw pillow was set precisely in the middle of the white couch. Over the fireplace, a square white porcelain vase was placed in the exact center of the mantle. She herself was now recentered, sitting perfectly straight on the edge of her chair, and looking right at me.

  I rearranged my things to make them a bit neater and lined up my piles with the table edge. I drank from my cup and put it down right across from hers.

  “Let me be frank,” I said. “You seem like a nice lady. Smart. Attractive.” She colored slightly. “And reserved. Why are you doing this?”

  She smiled, girlishly, and when her nose crinkled I noticed the freckles hidden under her powder. Her eyes jumped to mine and then away. “Why Mr. Bloch,” she asked me, like a heroine in one of the books on her shelf, “haven’t you ever been in love?”

  Morgan was in college during the murders and the trial. English major of course. Growing up in the Midwest and attending school in Chicago, she remembered the case only vaguely, but she did recall the manhunt, the shivers of fear she felt watching the news with her sorority sisters, and of course, the handsome defendant. It was only years later, after she had dropped the books and earned an MBA in New York, that she again ran across the story in the local papers, now centered on the endless appeals. Meanwhile, her personal life had not gone well. An early marriage to a depressive Byron scholar had ended badly and was followed by years of successful workaholism, boring dates with colleagues, and a fertile fantasy life that grew tangled and wild within the walls of that pristine apartment.

  The more Morgan spoke, the more relaxed she seemed, and as coffee proceeded to wine and cheese, and we proceeded to the white-on-white living space, she became more voluble, in that way we sometimes are with strangers. I’d experienced this before with interview-ees, who often said extraordinary things, even on tape, simply because I sat there nodding and let them fill up the silence. Morgan was attractive, as noted above (she even reminded me a bit of Jane, if only in her bookishly clumsy grace), but I was careful not to mistake her gradually loosening tongue for real intimacy. If anything, the opposite forces were at play: wine and anonymity. Not only were her name and reputation safe with me but, as Clay’s errand boy, I was even less threatening than a therapist or priest, since I would offer no judgment or diagnosis at all. Who cares what I thought? I was just the ghost.

  “Even when I was married,” she said, pouring more wine, “there was always something missing for me, sexually.” She sat in the overstuffed chair, bare feet folded beneath her thighs, pointy black heels leaning together on the floor, while I sank slowly into the couch. “I had a hard time, you know, having orgasms.”

  She glanced at me, as if to gauge my reaction. I looked at the piece of Brie in my hand and nodded sagely. “I see,” I said.

  “I even thought that maybe I was gay, but that wasn’t it. I had no attraction to women. Then I thought it was organic, you know, like a hormone thing or I just had a low sex drive.” She dated men from work, some very handsome, some very rich, but never felt any real erotic p
assion, except in her own imagination, creating elaborate fantasies about the dominant, dangerous men she read about or saw on TV, Darian Clay included.

  “The truth is, I’ve always had these fantasies. I would imagine scenarios when I was by myself. But I never discussed them with anyone. I thought there was just something wrong with me. Then I discovered the whole Internet world.”

  “Porn?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant as I dunked my cheese in my wine. “Oops.” I chuckled suavely and popped it in my mouth. “You were talking, I think, about porn?”

  “Yes. I went to those websites. The worst I could find. And to those forums and rooms. It’s awful the things I look at online. I’ve even called some of those phone lines and had men say terrible things to me, call me a pig and a slut, while I, you know. I was horribly ashamed of course, but I couldn’t help myself. It was all I thought about. But I never did anything or told anyone and I never expected to. Until I met Darian. Somehow he sensed it in me.”

  She wrote Clay a letter of support expressing belief in his innocence. He answered, and a correspondence developed, becoming more romantic, more passionate, more erotic. He asked for photos, perfumed paper, pubic hair folded into letters. He told her what to do.

  In many ways Clay was the perfect boyfriend, especially for a shy woman who’d been hurt before. He had unlimited time and energy to focus on her. He was passionate, interested, devoted. There was (she thought) no competition from other women, and little risk of real life ruining the fantasy. This was one man who would never leave the toilet seat up or snore or fart or disappoint her in bed. He would never be commitment-phobic or emotionally unavailable or have intimacy issues. Based on what I’d seen, she was far more intelligent than he was, but wasn’t this the case for lots of women? And if she was largely projecting her fantasies onto him, didn’t plenty of men do this, and not at a distance either, but with the women right beside them every day? Even the kinkiness becomes easier to understand. Of course she could let her fantasies run further, and into darker places, than the average woman: there was no chance they would ever come true.

  “But you can’t ever be together,” I said, trying to press her. “I mean, not really.”

  She smiled, swirling the wine in her glass, watching it slip down the sides. “I feel closer to him than to anyone I ever met. And I believe he will be free one day. Lots of couples have endured long separations.”

  “Sure, if they were together and then something happened, a war or whatever. But you’ve never once really been alone. Or had sex.”

  She smiled again. Clearly, her look seemed to say, you have never truly loved, nor has any woman truly loved you.

  “In the end, sex is all in the mind,” she told me. “Bodies don’t matter.”

  25

  From The Taming of the Slut by Tom Stanks:

  Morgan felt him before she saw him. She looked up from her magazine and there he was, standing by the door of the subway car, a tall man, dark-haired, brutally handsome, dressed all in black—black suit, black overcoat, black boots. He didn’t look away like most men did when she caught them staring. He met her eyes with his deep, dark eyes. Piercingly intelligent and soulful, in a strong masculine way, they seemed to burn right into her, to see the secrets of her heart. She blushed and looked down, and pressed her long, slender legs together more tightly under the dress that suddenly felt too short. But the shudder of fear that went through her well-toned body, and even the flash of anger, did nothing to stop the sudden spring of desire she felt between her shapely legs. She peeked again. He was still staring. Now she felt sure that he knew she was aroused and could see the hard nipples on her full, ripe breasts thrusting against the thin jersey fabric. She was ashamed. It was like she had no control over her own body. It was like he was in control.

  When they got to her stop she fled, clacking on her high spiked heels up the steps, down her dark street and home, afraid to look back, but thinking, fearing, perhaps hoping that he was there behind her like a shadow. A shadow cast by the night.

  By the time Morgan pushed into her tastefully decorated apartment on Horatio Street, she could barely contain herself. The juice was running down her inner thighs like sap from a split maple tree in high season. She ran to the bedroom and got her vibrator out of its hiding place. Her breathing was crazy. She closed her eyes. She moaned. And then she heard it. Demonic laughter. She looked up. It was him, the dark stranger from the train. She had forgotten to lock the door. Or had she purposely left it unlocked, for him?

  “I knew it,” he said. “I always know. I can smell when a woman wants me.”

  “Who, who are you?”

  “My name is Darian,” he said, stepping in. “But you will call me Master.”

  26

  “Pretty good,” Darian said, when I stopped reading. “But why’s it take so long to get to the good stuff? Like that part where he cuts her panties off with his pocketknife? I would have done that right on the train.”

  “This seemed more realistic,” I explained. “It builds the tension. You track her, getting closer, knowing all along.”

  “Yeah, that is true,” he allowed. “I can always tell. I like how he knew from just a sniff that she wanted it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But what about later when he slaps her? You said she almost came. Why almost? She should just come right there.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Well, if that happens right on page one, there’s no story,” I argued, as if I were back in school, defending myself against a writing workshop. Who did this guy think he was, anyway? At least I could spell. “You need something to work up to. Writingwise.”

  He nodded noncommitally. “What’s the rest?”

  “Look, I can’t read the whole thing to you. We only have an hour.” Now that he was starting to bug me, I was no longer frightened. I foresaw a long, annoying sentence for myself if I didn’t get this interview going. I put the pages back in their manila envelope. “You can take it back to your cell, after, and read the rest.”

  “OK, OK,” he said. “Let’s do it. Get out your little recorder.”

  Which I did. It took me a minute to get it going and to find my questions. Clay waited patiently, a vague smile on his lips.

  “You were abandoned by your mother, right?” I asked.

  “Wrong.” He snapped the word off and then stared at me, motionless.

  “Sorry, I was just going by what I read.”

  “You read wrong,” he snapped again.

  “Well, this is your chance to set it right.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about your mother?”

  “My mother’s dead,” I told him.

  “Sorry.” He frowned, at himself, it seemed. “No offense.”

  “It’s all right.” I paused the tape. “Look, we don’t have to discuss it if you don’t want to. But you said we would start at the beginning.”

  “You’re right. Deal’s a deal.” He nodded at the recorder and I started it rolling again. He took a breath. “My mother. For one thing she didn’t abandon me. The cops took my mother from me. And then the state kept me from her. That’s who ruined my childhood. The government. Same people as got me now. People say I hate women? I hate cops. If they find a chopped-up social worker from child services, come talk to me. But no one loves girls more than me. That’s my life’s work.”

  “Let’s get back to your mother,” I said. “Maybe it’s not true. I’m just asking about what I read, but the papers also say that she was . . . that she worked . . .”

  “A whore?” He leaned forward, grinning, cuffed hands between his knees. “Is that the word you’re looking for? Sure, my mother was a whore. I’ll say it. So what? We had to eat. How many women around this country last night spread their legs for some guy they don’t want so they can eat? It’s called marriage. So my dad, whoever the fuck he was, took off. He’s the bastard, not me. So she didn’t fuck him for her rent. She fucked some other guy. So what? She was a whore. She was a wa
itress. She worked in a factory sewing doll clothes. Probably no one does that anymore, huh? Here, I mean. This was out in Brooklyn. I remember she brought me home some and I put them on my GI Joe. She sewed my clothes there too. I guess they let her.”

  “She sewed you clothes?” I asked. “Like pants? That’s hard, I think.”

  “No, I mean sewed them up, you know. With patches. Because we were poor.”

  “Right, right.”

  “She was a good mom is my point. We had breakfast together every morning. Cereal. I remember I loved the taste of coffee, even when I was just a little kid—”

  “Me too,” I chimed in without thinking.

  “So she used to put just a little in my milk.”

  “With a lot of sugar, me too!”

  “I still get the craving for that sometimes,” he said.

  “You can get that here?”

  “What? Coffee and milk? Sure. I mean I only feel like it once in a while.”

  “Oh yeah. Of course.” I laughed. “I wasn’t thinking. I pictured you like ordering it.”

  “Yeah right, from the CO.” Clay laughed too, showing those choppers, which reminded me again where I was. I felt a sudden wave of self-disgust, of shame before my own eyes, giggling with the killer. But it worked, or seemed to; the connection was made and he relaxed, leaning back in his chair as he went on without my prompting.

  “Then one day she left and never came back. The whole night went by. I had a neighbor who used to look after me, but this was after we moved out from there. A hotel in Corona, I think. Or Ozone Park, maybe? I can’t remember exactly.”

  “I can check that.”

  “I was alone the whole night through. No food in the house. Just some Cap’n Crunch at the bottom of the box, I remember, like the crumbs. No milk.”