Gerald's Game - Stephen King [1]
That was cruel, but not entirely inaccurate. But how did you tell your husband of almost twenty years that every time he grinned he looked as if he were suffering from light mental retardation? The answer was simple, of course: you didn't. His smile was a different matter entirely. He had a lovely smile — she guessed it was that smile, so warm and good-humored, which had persuaded her to go out with him in the first place. It had reminded her of her father's smile when he told his family amusing things about his day as he sipped a before-dinner gin and tonic.
This wasn't the smile, though. This was the grin — a version of it he seemed to save just for these sessions. She had an idea that to Gerald, who was on the inside of it, the grin felt wolfish. Piratical, maybe. From her angle, however, lying here with her arms raised above her head and nothing on but a pair of bikini panties, it only looked stupid. No . . . retarded. He was, after all, no devil-may-care adventurer like the ones in the men's magazines over which he had spent the furious ejaculations of his lonely, overweight puberty; he was an attorney with a pink, too-large face spreading below a widow's peak which was narrowing relentlessly toward total baldness. just an attorney with a hard-on poking the front of his undershorts out of shape. And only moderately out of shape, at that.
The size of his erection wasn't the important thing, though. The important thing was the grin. It hadn't changed a bit, and that meant Gerald hadn't taken her seriously. She was supposed to protest; after all, that was the game.
'Gerald? I mean it.'
The grin widened. A few more of his small, inoffensive attorney's teeth came into view; his IQ tumbled another twenty or thirty points. And he still wasn't hearing her.
Are you sure of that?
She was. She couldn't read him like a book — she supposed it took a lot more than seventeen years of marriage to get to that point — but she thought she usually had a pretty good idea of what was going through his head. She thought something would be seriously out of whack if she didn't.
If that's the truth, toots, how come he can't read you? How come he can't see this isn't just a new scene in the same old sex-farce?
Now it was her turn to frown slightly. She had always heard voices inside her head — she guessed everyone did, although people usually didn't talk about them, any more than they talked about their bowel functions — and most of them were old friends, as comfortable as bedroom slippers. This one, however, was new . . . and there was nothing comfortable about it. It was a strong voice, one that sounded young and vigorous. It also sounded impatient. Now it spoke again, answering its own question.
It isn't that he can't read you; it's just that sometimes, toots, he doesn't want to.
'Gerald, really — I don't feet like it. Bring the keys back and unlock me. We'll do something else. I'll get on top, if you want. Or you can just lie there with your hands behind your head and I'll do you, you know, the other way.'
Are you sure you want to do that? the new voice asked. Are you really sure you want to have any sex with this man?
Jessie closed her eyes, as if she could make the voice shut up by doing that. When she opened them again, Gerald was standing at the foot of the bed, the front of his shorts jutting like the prow of a ship. Well . . . some kid's toy boat, maybe. His grin had widened further, exposing the last few teeth — the ones with the gold fillings — on both sides. She didn't just dislike that dumb grin, she realized; she despised it.
'Iwill let you up . . . if you're very, very good. Can you be very, very good, Jessie?'
Corny, the new no-bullshit voice commented. Très corny.
He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underpants like some absurd gunslinger. The jockeys went down pretty fast once they got past his not-inconsiderable love handles. And there it was, exposed. Not the formidable