Gerald's Game - Stephen King [59]
She backs up, shaking her head, not knowing if she wants to laugh or cry. The subject itself is new, but the rhetoric is all too familiar. The lawyer's tricks don't work on me, Gerald — I've been married to one too long, What we both know is that the business with the handcuffs was never about me at all. It was about you . . . about waking up your old booze-stunned John Thomas a little, to be blunt. So you can just save your fucked-up version of female psychology, okay?
Gerald is smiling in a knowing, disconcerting way. Good try, babe. It doesn't wash, but it was still a damned good shot. The best defense is a good offense, right? I think I taught you that. Never mind, though. Right now you've got a choice to make. Either put the bracelets on or swing that mallet and kill me again.
She looks around and realizes with dawning panic and dismay that everyone at Will's party is watching her confrontation with this naked (except for his glasses, that is), overweight, sexually aroused man . . . and it's not just her family and her childhood friends, either. Mrs Henderson, who will be her Freshman Advisor at college, is standing by the punch-bowl; Bobby Hagen, who will take her to the Senior Prom — and fuck her afterward in the back seat of his father's Oldsmobile 88 — is standing on the patio next to the blonde girl from the Neuworth Parsonage, the one whose parents loved her but idolized her brother.
Barry, Jessie thinks. She's Olivia and her brother's Barry.
The blonde girl is listening to Bobby Hagen but looking at Jessie, her face calm but somehow haggard. She is wearing a sweatshirt which shows R. Crumb's Mr Natural hurrying down a city street. The words in the balloon coming out of Mr Natural's mouth say, 'Vice is nice, but incest is best.' Behind Olivia, Kendall Wilson, who will hire Jessie for her first teaching job, is cutting a piece of chocolate birthday cake for Mrs Paige, her childhood piano teacher. Mrs Paige is looking remarkably lively for a woman who died of a stroke two years ago while picking apples at Corrit's Orchards in Alfred.
Jessie thinks, This isn't like dreaming; it's like drowning. Everyone I've ever known seems to be standing here under this weird starlit afternoon sky, watching my naked husband try to put me in handcuffs while Marvin Gaye sings 'Can I Get a Witness.' If there's any comfort to be had, it's this: things can't possibly get any worse.
Then they do. Mrs Wertz, her first-grade teacher, starts to laugh. Old Mr Cobb, their gardener until he retired in ii964, laughs with her. Maddy joins in, and Ruth, and Olivia of the scarred breats. Kendall Wilson and Bobby Hagen are bent almost double and they are clapping each other on the back like men who have heard the granddaddy of all dirty jokes in the local barber-shop. Perhaps the one whose punchline is A life-support system for a cunt.
Jessie looks down at herself and sees that now she is naked, too. Written across her breasts in a shade of lipstick known as Peppermint Yum-Yum are three damning words: DADDY'S LITTLE GIRL.
I have to wake up, she thinks. I'll die of shame if I don't.
But she doesn't, at least not right away. She looks up and sees that Gerald's knowing, disconcerting smile has turned into a gaping wound. Suddenly the stray dog's blood-soaked snout pokes out between his teeth. The dog is also grinning, and the head that comes shoving out between its fangs like the onset of some obscene birth belongs to her father. His eyes, always a bright blue, are now gray and haggard above his grin. They are Olivia's eyes, she realizes, and then she realizes something else, as well: the flat mineral smell of lakewater, so bland and