Kissing in Manhattan (13 page)

To which you undoubtedly reply that I am one twisted individual. Well, so what? If you’re one of these people who feels he deserves a straight story, like I have some duty to enlighten or clarify, then go fuck yourself. How would you know the first thing about who I am, about what’s choking me, about what I can or cannot endure? Maybe if your best friend gets his neck broken by a man in a giant Guppy suit, we can talk. Barring that, I humbly beg you to shut the fuck up. I’m trying to talk about my gun, and the priest and the women whose wrists I hold behind their backs. I’m trying to talk about things that are potentially absurd but that can also level absurdity, nullify it, if only for a moment.

So, the priest. His name is Father Thomas Merchant. He’s the pastor at St. Benedict’s Catholic Church, which is smack in the middle of Wall Street. Here’s a big, fat surprise, I’m Catholic. That means that I know there’s a God and that I grew up listening to inordinately bad acoustic guitarists every Sunday. Let’s get one thing straight, though. My knowing there’s a God doesn’t change my brother being dead, and it doesn’t stop the world from being full of pain. Yes, Jesus walked among us, and yes, you might get creamed in the street this afternoon by a delivery van carrying diapers or cherry cola. So I don’t waste my time begging God to help me win the Lotto or to keep children from suffering or to play Mr. Fixit for life on earth. God’s already proven He’s not going to do that to anyone’s satisfaction. Consequently, I feel quite free to say the word fuck whenever I choose, and to make and spend obscene amounts of money every day. I wear Armani suits, I read a tickertape the way doctors read an EKG, and I wait for that diaper van to run me down.

Father Merchant comes into the picture like this. Every evening, after work, I duck into St. Benedict’s while Father Merchant is saying five o’clock Mass. I get there in time for the gospel and the sermon. I never sit down. Instead, I stand in back, in the shadows behind the candle trays, and I leave after the sermon. I never go to Communion, because not only do I carry a gun, but I love and need my gun in a way that God did not commission. I also never go to Confession because of what Guppy did to Francis. I can’t enter utterly into the sober contemplation of my own faults while there are still men in fish suits breaking the necks of little boys.

I enjoy hearing Father Merchant, though. He’s not one of these softy modern guys preaching milk and cookies and moral loopholes. He’s got scraggly brown hair and strong brown teeth, like he’s been eating sand in a desert.

“The Commandments come first,” says Father Merchant. “The Beatitudes second.”

What Father Merchant means is that it’s no good worrying about meek, merciful peacemaking if you hate your parents, or if you’re fucking someone you’re not married to, or if you can’t tell people the truth. Father Merchant, of course, is an unpopular preacher. He’s got a gut, and his brown teeth are probably from cigarettes. Most nights I’m the only person under forty at St. Benedict’s, and the handful of old women in the pews wouldn’t exactly inspire the young or delight the weak. What I mean is, there are no frills at St. Benedict’s, no cozy youth groups, no flautists, no epiphanies. Father Merchant represents a God who needs to be obeyed rather than embraced, and that happens to be the kind of God I understand, a God who is truth—even if it’s absurd truth—rather than comfort.

Yahoo, you’re thinking. I already mentioned that I tie women up every night, or hold their wrists behind their backs, so you’re thinking, Enough already, get to the sexy stuff.

Fine, except I’m not sure you’ll think it’s sexy. It’s sexy to me, though.

What I do is, I meet really beautiful women almost every day. I meet them in bars, on the subway, at bodegas, on the street. I am young, rich, handsome, unmarried, and often broodingly withdrawn into my thoughts, an irresistible combination for female
Homo sapiens.
Also, I have absolutely no compunction about saying whatever the hell I want, and most women adore that too. Either they adore it, or they’re appalled but so intrigued that they can’t help investigating me by accepting a date. I’ll give an example. The following conversation took place three months back between myself and a young German au pair named Eva. Eva is nineteen, with a forest of lush black hair, and eyes just as black. She has very pale skin. She is not skinny, but she has a killer figure, and she is undyingly sensual. When I first saw her, she was standing in front of FAO Schwarz, holding the hand of a boy named Rusty, the boy she takes care of. They were looking together through the store window at a giant stuffed animal Triceratops, and a June breeze pushed Eva’s short dress around her thighs. I walked right up.

“I’m Patrick Rigg,” I said.

Eva looked me up and down. She saw that I was dangerous, but she yawned. Undyingly sensual women can yawn on command.

“Gee,” said Eva. “Gosh. Golly. Wow.”

“I’m Rusty,” said Rusty.

I ignored the child.

“You’re not skinny,” I told Eva, “but you have a killer figure.”

Eva stopped yawning. She frowned at me, tried to look naive.

“Killer?” she asked. “Figure?”

“You have a marvelous body,” I said.

Eva’s lips parted slightly. I had her now.

Rusty tugged on Eva’s hand, tried to remind her of himself.

“Long ago,” he said, “Triceratops roamed the earth.”

I didn’t take my eyes off of Eva.

“Rusty,” I said, “if you go inside and leave us alone, I’ll buy you that Triceratops.”

Rusty raced inside.

“Hey,” Eva called after him.

“Forget him,” I said.

Eva watched her charge through the window. Rusty was poking a salesclerk on the arm, pointing excitedly at the dinosaur.

“You shouldn’t lie to children,” said Eva.

My God, women are lovely. They’re lovely and prophetic. I could see from Eva’s simple cotton dress, from the lack of sun in her skin, from the way the breeze blew her hair into her teeth, that she knew she’d be in my bedroom that very night. She was only nineteen, but she already knew how to deflect the conversation away from herself to something neutral and insignificant, like Rusty. She knew that if she did that, if she prattled stupidly for a while, she could relax and let me move her toward lust.

“I wasn’t lying,” I said. “I’ll buy him the dinosaur.”

Eva gazed through the window display. She knew not to look at me.

“That dinosaur,” she said, “will cost hundreds of dollars. Maybe even a thousand.”

“Good,” I said.

Eva smiled, and that was that. She met me at Saks Fifth Avenue later that night, when she got off work. I spentfour grand on a silk dress and heels and a makeover for her, then took her to dinner at Duranigan’s, where I take all my women. By eleven we were back at my apartment, in my bedroom, in the dark. With a pocketknife blade I cut Eva’s dress off her body and sashed it around her neck like a scarf. Eva stood expectantly in her brassiere and underwear, with the silk around her neck, waiting for me to remove all her clothing, lay her down, and take her. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I held Eva’s wrists behind her back and made her look at herself in my dressing mirror. I held her like that for an hour, until she was hot and bothered, then I dressed her in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, got her a cab, and sent her home.

By now you’re wishing maybe that there were a sexual 911, so you could phone in my psychosis. If so, you have no sexual imagination, and I’ll leave you to your sorry missionary position. If you’re intrigued, though, I’ll tell you some secrets. One is that I don’t fuck women, on God’s orders. I’m not a virgin—I’ve had my slips—but I know the real rules as well as you. Following those rules or not is completely your affair, and if you’re looking for an argument, find a Jesuit. What I want to talk about, what I want to honor, are the most beautiful creations on the planet, women’s bodies. If you’re a woman, and you’re sick of hearing about how gorgeous you are, tough. I’m going to say what I want, and if you’d rather be demeaned or disregarded or merely endured, go find some stupid lover who will screw you blindly for his own pleasure, or maybe some drunk who will slap you around. I have a different aesthetic, and here it is. Women save me from absurdity. Think what you like about me, but when I watch the news and see thousands of Ecuadorians killed by a hurricane, or when a diaper truck flattens a pedestrian, or when I’m plagued by thoughts of my brother’s fishy neck, I have to run to the nearest beautiful woman I know and lavish all the money and attention on her that I can. It’s the only thing that helps, the only thing that loosens the straitjacket.

Why this is, I don’t entirely know, and I don’t much care. Some cynical scientist somewhere would surely cry biology in my face, and claim that my admiration for women’s breasts and hips and haircuts is pheromone based and unconscious. Well, I’ve got a bullet for that guy too. Any man whose craving for women isn’t rooted in his spirit will never be ableto honor women the way I do. And any woman who can’t learn to revel in her own body—who loathes being put on a pedestal by herself or by a man—isn’t worth my time. I’m only putting her on the pedestal so I can join her up there, anyway. At midnight, in the room where I sleep, when I cross a woman’s wrists at the small of her back, and hold her stripped to her underthings before a mirror, I’m asking her not only to feel the power I have over her, but to see and understand and love the power that she has over me. I want her to know that just being near her body, her gestures, thrills and pleases me, as much as and maybe more than plain old fucking would.

It takes a long while for most women to come around to my brand of intimacy, if they do at all. Like a painter who has models sit for him, I usually only hold my women for about an hour at a time, and I never have the same woman in my bedroom more than once a week. Still, many of them leave after that first hour—that first night—insulted that I haven’t humped them. Trust me, the ones who run away that fast are lost anyway. They’re doomed to futures and marriages barren of the long, slow sensuality that yields fire between men and women. The women who come back to my bedroom, though, are the glorious ones, the ones who are willing to endure the ache of detachment. I hold these women on their feet before my mirror, and they quickly learn the rules.

The rules are, the woman wears her brassiere and underwear and whatever dress I’ve bought her and shredded and tied around her neck. I wear and, at this point, never remove my suit. There are no kisses or caresses, no words exchanged, no laughter, no music. I hold the woman’s wrists crossed behind her back, and I keep a ruthlessly tight grip. This way the woman knows she is helpless. She knows I can take her if I want to. But after a while—when she understands that I’m not going to take her, but keeps returning to me anyway—an amazing thing happens. The woman begins to forget that I’m there. She stares at herself, gets to know her body, and, hopefully, comes to love what she sees, comes to understand that the creature in the mirror is something extraordinary, elegant, wrapped in dignity, something not meant to be taken lightly or grabbed at and denuded too quickly.

Sometimes, women get wild over themselves. Some thrash and try to tear one of their hands free so they can jam it down between their thighs. I never let this happen. I want them to come just as much as they want themselves to, but I want to be part of it, and I want our joy to be enormous. So, after a month or so of half-naked nights in the mirror, I up the ante and move the woman to my bed. She often presumes the time has come to fuck, but she’s mistaken. I’ll tell you how it happened with Eva, just last month.

“Walk over to the bed,” I told her.

Eva obeyed. It was a warm August Thursday—I always have Eva over on Thursdays—and Eva stood at the foot of the bed. A light midnight breeze from my open window blew Eva’s silk scarf around her shoulders. The scarf was light gray. An hour before, it had been a dress.

I walked over, stood facing Eva. I’m a foot taller than she.

“Do you remember how much that dress cost me?” I asked.

“Twenty-two hundred and nine dollars and seventy-seven cents,” said Eva.

Eva’s perfume, Serendipity, was rich in my nostrils. All my women wear Serendipity.

“Are you impressed,” I asked, “by the money I spend on you?”

Eva nodded. Outside my window there was moonlight on the Hudson.

“Are you worth it?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Eva.

“Are you beautiful?” I asked.

“I’m breathtaking,” said Eva. She didn’t smile, and she kept her hands at her sides while she spoke. She kept her eyes on mine. She was ready.

“Take off your underwear,” I said, “and your brassiere. Leave your scarf on.”

Eva obeyed quickly, then stood before me, hands at her sides. Eva’s parents are both professional auto mechanics, so that meant that when Eva removed her underclothes in front of me, I saw a naked nineteen-year-old German au pair with hefty breasts who could sing sweet songs to children and weld a broken car chassis. Intoxicating.

“You’re incredible,” I said, looking her over.

“Are you going to touch me?” Eva asked. She knew by now not to assume.

I shook my head. “I’m going to tie you up. Lie down on the bed, on your back, with your head on my pillow.”

Many women, quite content to be held, refuse to be lashed to bedposts. Eva’s not one of them.

“Get your ankles and wrists as close to the four bedposts as possible.”

Eva did this. I fetched some old ties from a box under my bed and tied Eva up tight.

“Now what?” asked Eva.

I smiled down at her. “Now I call my friends.”

Gang rapist! you’re thinking. Pervert and freak!

Listen, stop assuming you know me. I already told you that you can’t relate because your brother was never Guppied to death. So, unless you’re in the business of binding women to bedposts on a pretty much nightly basis, don’t pretend to know how I go about it and why.

“Don’t make a sound,” I instructed Eva. “No matter what happens when the crowd arrives, don’t make a sound.”

Eva looked up at me. The gray silk was coiled around her neck and one end of it had slunk down to her abdomen. She had some natural human fear in her eyes, but she nodded her consent. God, is Eva sensual.