The room — his cage, he called it — was perhaps fifteen feet wide by twenty feet long, he had paced it off the first time she’d locked him in here. He had been on the island only a week then, and had told her he wanted to go back to the mainland, and she’d said, Sure, she just wanted to make a phone call, why didn’t he mix himself a drink, relax a bit, she wouldn’t be a minute. He trusted her then; this was after a week of fucking their brains out all over the house — her bedroom, the living room floor, the kitchen with her bare ass on the countertop and her legs wrapped around his waist, the playroom, and this room, which had been a guest room before it became his cage and which — she told him — had been a psychiatrist’s office before she bought the house. That explained the double doors.
The doors were massive, made of sturdy oak, one opening into the room with the knob on the left, the other opening out with the knob on the right. If you were inside the room and you opened the first door, you found yourself smack up against the second door. This was for privacy. When the psychiatrist owned the house, he didn’t want anyone to hear the rantings of the crazy people who paid him $60 an hour to lie on his couch. Thick double doors. Piano hinges on each of the doors, you couldn’t take out any pins and lift the doors off their hinges because there weren’t any exposed pins to take out. Locks on both doors, the inside one and the outer one. No windows on any of the walls because this was a room that had been part of a big cinder-block, rectangular-shaped basement with the furnace in one corner before the psychiatrist built some walls around the furnace and divided the remaining space into equal halves — the playroom next door, where Santo had fucked her on the pool table the first week he was here, and this room, his cage, that had once been the psychiatrist’s office, but was now a proper guest room with a wall unit opposite the bed, and a couch against one of the walls, and pictures on the walls, and the big double bed itself of course, and the private bathroom with a sink, a toilet, and a tub.
“Sure,” she’d told him, “you just relax, make yourself a drink. I have these phone calls to get off my mind, and then well hop in the boat and I’ll take you back to the mainland, okay, sweetie?” Sure, sweetie. He’d gone to the bar that was part of the wall unit opposite the bed, and he’d mixed himself a scotch and soda, and then he’d sat on the couch listening to the stereo. This was seven years ago, the record collection was old even then, most of the tunes going back a long, long time. She hadn’t replaced any of the records in the past seven years; he listened to the same stuff over and over again, the records worn and scratchy now, the way he was worn and scratchy, seven years, seven years in this room. But that night long ago, after they’d spent a week together out here on the island, beautiful that September, woman with her own private little island off Sands Spit, man, he was impressed! Couldn’t get enough of him, told him she was twenty-eight years old, but he saw a college graduation picture of her in the living room, and there was a date on the back of it, and he figured a person graduated college when they were twenty-two, right? Well, maybe younger if they were real smart, so okay give her the benefit of the doubt, say she graduated when she was twenty, nobody graduated college younger than twenty, which according to the date on the back of the graduation picture would’ve made her thirty-two years old and not what she claimed to be, not twenty-eight like she claimed. Which made her thirty-nine years old now, an old lady.
Where was his dinner, wasn’t she gonna bring him no dinner tonight, was she going to starve him the way she did for two weeks that time he almost escaped? Would’ve made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the dog. She knew he was scared of dogs, he’d told her so, pillow talk during their first week together, terrified of dogs, you know what I mean? When I was eight years old, I got bit by a dog on the roof. Goddamn fox terrier, guy had taken him up on the roof to do his business, fuckin mutt came at me and tore a piece out of my leg. I had to get rabies shots, you ever have rabies shots? Christ, the pain. I been scared of dogs ever since, I shit in my pants a dog even comes near me. He was over the wall and out when she let the dog loose — big German shepherd, came after him with his fangs bared, knocked him to the ground, he went tumbling over in the tall sea grass at the ocean’s edge, clawing at the dog’s big head, trying to keep those teeth away from him, the ocean pounding in, her voice coming in over the roar of the surf, “No, Clarence, no,” some fuckin name for a killer German shepherd, Clarence! Picked up the dog’s leash in one hand, and told Santo to head back for the house like a nice little boy, saw where he’d picked the locks on both doors and locked him in the bathroom for the night, with the dog sitting just outside the door. All night long, he could hear the dog growling. She starved Santo for the next two weeks, as punishment for having tried to escape, and when finally she fed him again, there was something in the food — it knocked him out completely. He didn’t know how long he was out, but when he woke up there were new locks on both doors, dead-bolt locks, he couldn’t have picked them even if he was a pro. And from then on, the dog was always outside those big double doors, sitting in the hallway.
But that was later, that was — he kept losing track of time. The first time she’d locked him in here, yes, he was listening, yes, to her records, and sipping at his scotch, just digging the sound and thinking he’d be back in the city again soon, playing another gig with Georgie and the guys, sipping, smiling, and then becoming aware of time all at once, looking at his wristwatch and realizing she’d been gone a good half hour. Well, leave it to a woman, goes to make a few phone calls and takes forever. Smiling, he got off the couch and went to the door and twisted the knob the way he would have ordinarily, not suspecting a thing yet, and then discovering the door was locked, she had locked the door on him. He began yelling for her to come unlock the door, but if she heard him, she didn’t come do it. He doubted if she heard him, anyway, through those big double mothers. She didn’t come back till the next morning, to bring him a tray of breakfast. She had a gun when she came into the room, he didn’t know whether she’d had it in the house here all along, or whether she’d taken the boat over to the mainland to buy it. He didn’t know anything about guns, he couldn’t tell one caliber of gun from another. But this didn’t look like no dainty little gun a lady would keep in her handbag. This looked like a gun could blow a man’s head off. She told him to back away from the door, and he said, “Hey, come on, what is this?” and she wagged the gun at him and just said, “Back.” Then she put the breakfast tray on the floor and said, “There’s your food, eat it,” and went out, locking both doors behind her.
That breakfast was the first time she put anything in his food. He drank his orange juice, and then he ate his cornflakes and drank his coffee, and he didn’t know which of the things he ate or drank was doped, but something was because he passed out cold almost immediately afterward, and when he woke up again — he didn’t know how many hours later — he was naked on the bed, all his clothes gone, his wristwatch gone, his wrists tied together behind his back, and his feet tied together at the ankles. He started yelling for her again. But again, he didn’t know whether she could hear him through those double doors. Anyway, he was beginning to understand that she would come to him only when she wanted to. There was no sense yelling or screaming, there was no sense doing anything except trying to figure a way out.