He knew what the island looked like; she’d shown him around it during that first week when he was still a guest and not a prisoner, fucked her on the boat and on the beach, fucked her in the little pine forest that ran along the southern shore, fucked her day and night, never met a woman like her in his life, and told her so. But, you know, he missed, the city, wanted to get back to the city — “Are you getting tired of me?” she asked. “No, no, just want to walk those streets again, you know, hear those sidewalks humming under my feet, huh, baby? I’m a city boy, born and raised there, my mom’s from Venezuela and my pop’s from Trinidad — haven’t seen him since I was three and he took off with a girl used to waitress up in Diamondback — but me and my brother Georgie are one hundred percent American Yankee-Doodle Dandy boys, yessir,” he said, and burst out laughing. “Stay just another day,” she said.
That first week, she told him her daddy had bought the island for her when she was sixteen, a birthday present; you’re the only sixteen-year-old girl in the world who has her own private island, Daddy had told her. Santo pictured him as some kind of asshole rich guy with white duck pants and a double-breasted blue blazer, white yachting cap on his head, “Here you are, darlin, here’s your own private island” — while people all over the world were digging in garbage cans for food. Built her a house on the island when she got married, told his daughter she ought to have a little place where she could get away from it all, little seaside hideaway half an hour from the mainland, only it wasn’t so little — there were four bedrooms in the place, not to mention the playroom in the basement and the guest room that used to be the psychiatrist’s—
That was the first time he caught her lying. That was during the first week; he wasn’t even her prisoner then, they were still, you know, making it day and night and promising undying love to each other. He caught the lie, and he said, “Hey, how come if your daddy bought you this island when you were sixteen, and then he built this house for you when you were twenty-one and got married — then how come you told me you bought this house from a man who used to be a psychiatrist and who put those big double doors in downstairs so nobody could hear his patients yelling they’re Napoleon, how come, huh?”
So she admitted then that she hadn’t bought the house from a psychiatrist at all, she had in fact been married to the psychiatrist who’d put in those big double doors downstairs so that his patients could feel free to divulge the deepest secrets of their labyrinthine pasts without being overheard by anyone. It still sounded very fishy to Santo, and he told her so. This was on the fourth day, he guessed it was. This was when they were still eating, drinking, and making merry. She finally told him the truth the next day, or at least he guessed it was the truth, he couldn’t really say for sure. They were walking on the beach. He was wearing an old sweater she’d loaned him, said it had belonged to her psychiatrist husband, who wasn’t a psychiatrist at all — but of course he didn’t know that until after she’d told him the truth. There were gulls circling a dead fish that had washed ashore, raising a terrible racket, white and gray against the clear September sky, their beaks a more intense yellow than the pale gold of the sunshine in which they floated. The ocean was very calm. Her voice was very calm, too.
She told him it was true that her father had bought the island for her when she was sixteen, and she told him it was further true that he’d built the house here for her and her husband when they got married. “When I was twenty-one,” she said, “I’m twenty-eight now,” which was another lie, but he didn’t discover that one until he looked at the back of the graduation picture in the living room and saw the date. Anyway, the way she was telling it now, her husband left her after they’d been married only six months, just picked up and left her one day, and she’d had this, well, what you might call a nervous breakdown. Her father refused to have her committed to a hospital, so he arranged for private care in the house here on the island, which was when he had the double doors installed, both of them with locks on them. So that she wouldn’t hurt herself. She became suicidal, you see. When her husband left her. She tried committing suicide several times. The double doors, securely locked, were for her own protection. A nurse sat outside them day and night. This was when she was still twenty-one, and her husband left her.
Santo listened to all this and thought, Well, I hooked onto a real bedbug this time, but he expressed sympathy for all she’d been through, poor kid, and asked her how she was feeling now, and she said, “Can’t you tell how I’m feeling? I’m feeling marvelous!” He supposed that was true, she certainly looked healthy and strong and she fucked like a jackrabbit, but he’d once known a mentally retarded girl in Diamondback who everybody on the block used to fuck, take her up on the roof and fuck her, and whereas she didn’t have all her marbles when it came to arithmetic or spelling, she sure knew how to jazz a man clean out of his mind. Which might be the same with this girl, this woman really, said she was twenty-eight, but he knew she was thirty-two — she might be somebody who still ought to be kept behind locked doors except when she was fucking her brains out, which if she had her way she’d have done day and night through Christmas, except he told her he had to get back to the mainland.
Took him thirty seconds to realize he was a prisoner. If she hadn’t told him that story about the breakdown and the locked double doors, he’d have maybe thought, Well, the woman’s havin a little sport with me, she’s got me locked in here, but she’s gonna come down here in just a little while wearin only a black garter belt and mesh stockings and high-heeled patent-leather pumps, and she’s just gonna squirt whipped cream all over me and eat me up alive and beg my pardon for playin such a bad joke on me, makin me think I was a prisoner here. That’s what he might have thought if she hadn’t just two days earlier told him the story about going bonkers when her husband left right after they got married. She might have been lying about that, too, but he didn’t think somebody lied about having a mental breakdown. No, this room he found himself in — this prison, this cage — used to be her prison, her cage with a nurse sitting outside it, maybe ready with a straitjacket or a shot of something to knock her out, who the hell knew? And now he was the prisoner, and she was outside there, putting dope in his food whenever she wanted to, and coming to the room to pass the time of day with him, and showing him the big mother German shepherd the very day she bought him, which was three days after she locked him in — this was after she’d doped his food the first time, and he was lying bound hand and foot on the bed. The doors opened and she brought in the German shepherd, fuckin thing looked like a grizzly bear, he was that big. Santo backed away from him, and she smiled, the bitch, showing her even white teeth, tossing her long blond hair. “Don’t be frightened, sweetie,” she said, “Clarence is the gentlest human being on earth.” Clarence! And Clarence growled deep in his throat the way gentle human beings never do, man, he growled and those black lips of his or whatever you call them, that soft black flesh around the mouth drew back to show teeth that had to be six inches long, each and every one of them. The gentlest human being on earth looked like he was ready to tear a big fat hunk of meat out of Santo’s leg or maybe leap for his throat and rip out his windpipe. And she smiled. She smiled, the bitch. “Clarence is going to be on the island from now on,” she said. And later, after he tried to escape that first time and the dog came after him, later she told him that Clarence was going to be sitting outside his room from now on, just the way her nurse used to sit out there when she was having the trouble that time. “If there’s anything you need,” she said, smiling, “you just ask Clarence.” Smiling.