She
put her hands on her heart, then pointed towards Wilkins. Then she pointed
back towards herself, and then towards him. It was as if she were indicating
some kind of kinship. She smiled, withdrew through the hole, left the
room. He could hear her rummaging around in her bag again. . . .
She came back holding a pair of scissors.
"Hey hey hey," said Wilkins. "Whatcha gonna
do with those, huh?"
She approached the bottom of the bed again,
found the crack in the wall, climed through, stepped onto the bed. The
hinges of the old springs creaked underneath her. She walked forward,
standing on her knees, so that Wilkins was underneath her. She sat down
on his stomach. She grabbed his shirt at the bottom, and began to cut
it off with the scissors.
"Hey, wait a minute," Wilkins said. "That's
Fruit of the Loom."
She cut slowly, all they way up to the neck,
then made two smaller cuts across his chest to the armholes. She dropped
the scissors and pulled the pieces of shirt out from under him. Dent Wilkins
was now buck naked.
She bent down and kissed his navel. The
kisses were soft, and left a tiny trail of saliva and a whitish streak
of face-paint on his chest. She moved up past his nipples, towards his
collarbone, and sucked on the little hollow at the bottom of his throat.
Quietly she kissed his neck, his ear, and at last, his lips. She was very
gentle, Wilkins thought; it was like being licked by a kitten with a soft,
abrasive tongue.
"Huh huh huh," Wilkins laughed. "Huh."
She reached up and grabbed his hair and
cut off a big chunk from the left-hand side.
Hey, wait just a cotton-pickin' moment,"
he said.
She threw a handful of his hair down onto
the sheets. She grabbed another handful on the other side and cut it off
too.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
Wilkins said, frightened now. "This was not part of the goddamn bargain.
We never said a goddamn thing about this."
Judith put her finger over her mouth, to
indicate that he should be quiet. She took one more good snip off the
top, which was a difficult achievement considering the fact that Wilkins
was now struggling. Wilkins didn't heed her suggestion about being quiet.
He was pulling on the thongs and swearing. "Goddammit," he said. "You
know what this is gonna look like? People are gonna know. You realize
that? People are gonna fucking know now."
She stood up on her knees again, let the
scissors fall onto the sheets. Wilkins looked at them, with tears raging
through his eyes now. If he could have reached the scissors he would have
threatened her with them. But, of course, as he well knew, he couldn't
reach them. She was looking him in the eyes now; it was as if she'd dropped
the scissors only to make him realize he couldn't hurt her.
"Let me out of here," he said, but
it came out funny. It took him a moment to realize that in his confusion
he had spoken in the voice of Corky Chorkles. Judith just shook her head
as if he were insane.
She made that same gesture she had made
before, touching her own heart, then touching his. It was a sweet gesture,
all things considered, that pantomime of kinship. She leaned forward and
kissed him on the forehead, then walked on her knees back to the foot
of the bed. She climbed back out through the hole in the invisible wall
and left the room.
Wilkins lay in his honeymoon suite, surrounded
by the tufts of his own hair. He still felt the tears in his eyes, but
something within him surrendered. He knew he had crosse some border now,
that there was no way back.
From the living room came the sound of an
electric razor snapping to life.
"Oh God, no," Wilkins said. "Please, dear
God in heaven, no. Deliver me from this please."
He had a sudden image of himself, bald as
the full moon, clad in whiteface, dancing an invisible dance on the streetcorner
in front of his own home.
And at that moment there came a tremendous
crash, a sound of splintering wood and bodies falling onto the floor,
and a sudden rush of cool air coming from the newly formed hole in the
roof.
The body of Edith Schmertz, hurtling earthward
through space and time and thoughts of Dwayne, crashed through the eaves
of Wilkins' summer home, and fell, bull's-eye, upon Judith Lenahan. The
two women collapsed on the floor in a cacophony of wood and shingles and
falling moss, and the razor, still buzzing, flew out of Judith's hand
and skittered onto the hardwood floor in the bedroom. It lay there vibrating,
rocking back and forth, inches away from the bed upon which Dent Wilkins
now lay captive, frightened and shivering on the far side of a long, invisible
wall.
Excerpt written
by Jennifer Finney Boylan and reprinted with her permission
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