The Bone Parade (32 page)

The question suggests the depth of my desire, doesn’t it? That I would even contemplate myself with both of them at the same time. Already I have started to consider the obstacles, which more than anything means the possibility, however remote, that they would try to disable me. And though I am hesitant to admit it, I do have to accept that those two girls could indeed disable me if I were to lie with them, if I were to
open
myself to them.

Diamond Girl brought out a little of this fear, but I grew relaxed with her until we began that damnable chat, with her riddles and ridicule, the
Yes, I fucked my father. No, I didn’t. Now do you think you know me?
routine. But I am drawn to the idea of both of them. I find pleasure even in the prospect of squeezing the athletic limbs of Her Rankness.

My sheet has the appearance of a tent, and I am of the mind of a three-ring circus with these two, the simultaneous sex that only a threesome can inveigle. I’ve done it before. What artist or musician of any fame hasn’t? You’d have to be empty of imagination not to try. But never have I craved it. What are these two? My very own sirens? That’s what worries me finally, that they will lure me to my death.

I switch cameras to better reveal Diamond Girl from the front. Yes, the full frontal nudity that so entranced Sonny-boy when he first saw his sister blazing naked. As I settle down to this, resting against the headboard, lifting the sheet, Her Rankness walks into the picture. Diamond Girl rises to her knees, and begins to wrestle Her Rankness’s jeans off. Her Rankness offers no resistance. She just stands there as her jeans come down, and then her panties. Neither does she move when Diamond Girl presses her face against her muff. I cannot see exactly what my wicked little witch is up to with her mouth, her lips, that lascivious tongue of hers, but her hands are clutching those full round cheeks, pale as milk, and I can see her fingers flexing and unflexing in some strange rhythm that absolutely transfixes me. It is no longer the mystery of the mouth that I find so engaging, but the graphic possession of those hands. Diamond Girl is a miracle of longing. A blind man could see this. She squeezes, she kneads, she pleasures.

The bed is behind me before I realize just what it is that I’m doing. I take the stairs three at a time, throw open the door to the barn, the one to the cellar, bound down those final steps, and run past the bone parade.

My erection is enormous, straining upward, as if to split its own skin. Both girls pause to stare at it, and Diamond Girl—who but Diamond Girl?—waves me in.

The keys! I’ve left the keys upstairs. In my rush I have left without them. And do I dare enter this cage without my knife? Do I dare enter it at all?

I try to calm myself. I consider relieving this urge, this grilling need, as I stand apart, but cannot bear this awful thought for more than a miserable moment. I am tired of my own touch when all I want is theirs.

Then take Diamond Girl out. Take her out and take her upstairs, but
don’t
… don’t go in there with the two of them. For fleeting moments my caution prevails. I know without question that this would be the greatest risk I have ever taken, and for what? For nothing more than I can have at the opening of any of my shows. But I delude myself. At my openings I have middle-aged women admiring me, making their lewd allusions. I don’t have Diamond Girl, and I certainly don’t have the body of a young bicyclist whose most intimate urgencies have been anointed with the sweet emollient of her own sex.

This debate, these wildly frantic words cause me only to pause, but the admonitions that I offered myself only seconds ago now feel as weak as doors made of reeds, and I trample them easily as I climb the stairs. I even tell myself that I will get the key just for Diamond Girl, when I know this is no more than the permission to move, to linger no longer, for surely I know better. I know that Her Rankness is part of my desire too, that when I saw Diamond Girl’s hands on her flesh it was as if a blessing had been bestowed on those hard haunches, those athletic buttocks, and that they would rise to desire as easily as I. Now I see them both all over me, and I can see myself all over them. I even see Her Rankness’s mouth closing over mine, the sleek feel of her young tongue so eager to learn, so willing to please.

The key is in the … bedroom. Yes, in my trousers. I race back, this ungainly protuberance still bobbing up and down, smacking my belly, my legs, hurling itself about in a madness all but heedless of its master.

I fumble with the keys, fumble them badly, but at last I have them in hand. There on the monitor I watch them return to their pleasures, Diamond Girl always the initiator, and Her Rankness always so passive. It’s often like this at the start. I’ve read about the bulls in prison, how the one enforces the code of pleasure in the other until a new link is formed in the chain that binds them all together in the rich treason of their own sex.

That binds me to these two young bodies.

I hesitate over the knife, hesitate for long seconds, feel even a diminishment in my member when I consider the use of the blade. See, truly I am a romantic and care nothing for violence. I doubt my heart registers an extra beat when I work, even when the final ball of alginate finds its home at last; but now my heart races, races ahead of me, and I am out the door without the knife, with the assurance that they will give me pleasure, and I will do the same for them.

Down the stairs I sprint again, back into the barn, down the first step when I hear the pounding on the door. Not a knocking. No, this is a
pounding
. This is the sound of men.

I freeze. I don’t mind telling you that for two or three seconds I do, in fact, freeze with fear. Then I draw a breath and creep back up into the barn.

More pounding. The door is locked. I will never suffer that oversight again, though in the moments that have so immediately passed I was thankful for the rashness of Her Rankness, for all the succulent possibilities she has brought to life.

I close the door to the cellar, spread the straw back over the stall, and enter the house, locking the door behind me.

When I look out, I could scream. I could kill. I could take a claw hammer and pry out her eyeballs. It’s that nympho media whore, that poseur, that
plasterer
standing there looking like the harridan I’ve imagined from the pictures on the website.

Control yourself. Absolutely control yourself. I am so full of rage I could easily drag her into the basement and strap her down, enact the most wicked of dreams, and she without even an empty shotgun to save her.

But this is out of the question. I urge caution upon myself as the pounding resumes behind me, as I climb the stairs and go to the window above the front door.

You must endure this, I tell myself. You must. You have no choice in the matter.

The window, though little used, slides open.

“What are you doing on my property? And who are you?”

Let’s see how the nympho media whore introduces herself.

“I’ve called you over and over,” she shouts, the stentorian wench. “I’m Lauren Reed. We have to talk.”

We
have
to do no such thing, I all but shout back at her. But again, I force aside the urge to batter her. It would be much better to get this over with.

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

I close the window, and as much as I wish I could close her out too, I go to my room and dress quickly, my penis as limp as string. I hate her for this. I look at the monitor where Diamond Girl has her lips on the perfectly tiny teat of Her Rankness, and I hate her for all that I am missing.

L
AUREN HADN’T FOUND THE KEY
to Stassler’s gate, just as Ry had predicted, and she’d been forced to climb the barbed wire fence, at one point perching precariously over the top strand as she negotiated shaky footholds for which there could be no failure.

Then she had to pull mightily on the bottom strand while commanding and cajoling Leroy to crawl under it. Her dog showed a real reluctance to bellying along the ground, and she realized that while he might be charming, he was no commando. No endurance hound either: the forty-minute hike from her car to the compound had left him panting by her feet in the hot sun. Whatever security she’d hoped to find in his presence had been rapidly displaced by the reality of his discomfort.

Now she stood by Stassler’s door realizing that she was going to have to ask him for water, which she regretted bitterly. She wanted nothing of his favors because she had demands, but they would have to—

Stassler threw open the door, interrupting her thoughts. He looked every bit as lean and muscled as most of the men in his
Family Planning
series. They might have been modeled after him, except Stassler looked harder, somehow, than even his bronze figures. He wore a sleeveless shirt, and with the sun angled low, the morning shadows threw the taut muscles of his shoulders and arms into sharp relief. The body, she saw, of a young gymnast. Had she read that he had once performed on the high bar and rings, been capable of an iron cross?

“I’ve been calling you,” she said with far less anger than she’d felt when she’d pounded on the door and shouted to him at the window. She’d been softened, as she often was, by meeting the object of her scorn. Ashley Stassler was no longer simply words and ideas, no matter how offensive.

“Yes, that’s what you said. But I don’t check phone messages anymore. They’re tiresome.” He spoke as if he were stifling a yawn.

“I want to talk to you about Kerry, but first I need some water for him.” Her eyes fell to Leroy, who still lay beside her, panting heavily.

Stassler looked at the dog as if he hadn’t noticed him. Lauren detected a slight movement of the sculptor’s head. Disgust? Possibly. Nothing approbative, of that she felt sure. But then he walked past her and turned on a spigot protruding from the barn wall. The water sparkled brilliantly in the sun.

“Go on, Leroy,” she said.

Her dog rose heavily and walked over to the lush stream, biting at it to drink, his mouth a cavern opening and closing with each attempt.

She thanked Stassler.

“I’m very busy. What is it that you think I can do for you? Or Kerry?”

“You can show me where she was staying, where she slept, where she worked. She was my student,” Lauren said with feeling. “I can’t have her disappearing. I’ve got to know everything I can.”

“So you can find her? Do you really think you can do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said earnestly.

“I don’t see how I can help you. I’ve extended every opportunity to the sheriff, and I’ve talked to more pinhead reporters than the president. I have a lot of work to do. This is a very busy time for me right now. I was in the middle of starting a new project when you interrupted me, and I need to get back before the materials start to cool.”

Incredibly, he turned to walk away. She took his arm.

“Please. I’m trying to remember all I can about her, because in the end that’s all we may have. Can you at least show me her room, her bed, where she ate her meals, where she worked? This is important.”

He withdrew his arm, and strode toward the house. He spoke without looking back at her. “I’ll give you the tour. And then I’d appreciate it if you’d let me get back to work.”

Lauren tried to soak up every detail as she entered the foyer with its copper ceiling. She had a powerfully eidetic memory, and had first understood its blessing in childhood after her father had taken her to the famous boat show at Madison Square Garden in New York City. She’d come home with a great desire to draw, and had spent hours that night sketching the sailboats with photographic precision.

The same powers of observation came to her now as Stassler led her through the lofty living room and down the hall to the bedroom that had been Kerry’s.

A change of clothes lay on the floor. A foot away, the girl had left her panties strewn across a pair of flip-flops, as if she’d been in a rush to leave, to pull on the bike pants that would be torn so brutally from her body.

“I didn’t touch a thing,” Stassler said. His voice, the gesture of his hands, were dismissive.

This offends him, she realized. The violation of order. Underpants, just lying there! What a priss.

Lauren looked through each of the drawers, and under the bed. She opened the closet, having no idea what she might find. Not much, as it turned out. A single dress, a few pairs of pants, jeans mostly. Certainly no “smoking gun,” as Ry had put it.

“Are you ready?” Stassler’s tone revealed a trace of impatience.

She glanced around once more as she backed out of the bedroom. He showed her the kitchen, ample enough for a team of cooks.

“That’s where she ate.” He nodded at the breakfast bar. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

She hardly noticed his sarcasm, or the hand that herded her out the door.

“Okay?” he said.

“Thank you.” She looked bewildered. She was. Seeing evidence of Kerry without seeing the girl herself had finally unmoored Lauren.

He walked her out of the house and toward the road.

“No,” she said, feeling as if she’d snapped out of a fugue. “I want to see where she worked.”

Now Stassler appeared perplexed, but it was all for effect:

“You mean
you
want to see
my
foundry,
my
workplace? You’ve got to be kidding.” He circled his finger in the air as if to say, Guess again.

“I’m not kidding,” she said grimly. “And I’d like to take her portfolio with me. Do you know where it is? I didn’t see it in her bedroom.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it for a while.”

“What do you mean? You were supposed to be helping her.”

“I don’t suppose she was here long enough to benefit from my counsel.”

This infuriated Lauren, his casual disregard of the compact, the girl, and now her.

But before she could speak up, he pointed to the foundry.

“You want to see it? Fine. Let’s go.”

He led her to the brick building, the one she’d first seen from the helicopter.