What if it is? Deucey said.
Nice little body, not even hardly there-my favorite kind, that's all. What's your name, sweetheart?
Margaret Koderer. What's yours?
He smiled unpleasantly, with his rather beautiful dark red mouth. You like it on the racetrack?
Yeah. Except for all the dirt, Maggie said.
He looked her over carefully. The window purred up and he drove away.
AMONG MANY UNRULY ACTS, my dear Maggie, this was certainly your unruliest.
You were aware of yourself fully dressed and standing over her in her little pink silk underpants, the Telegraph folded back in your hands and-something new-another Telegraph open in her hands. She circled something awkwardly with a pencil.
Yes it was, wasn't it, she said, and you both smiled.
You were aware of standing over her in her ragged soft sweatshirt and little pink panties, Maggie on her back, with her bare feet up on a stool near the heater. The ugly brown grate hummed along in tiny hysteria, turned up full blast. As long as she had to live in a fish tin she considered it her right to set the thermostat for iguanas and flamingos, and of course for her naked pink self. (Against the flimsy pink membrane of her panties, her naked pink lips pressed, and the skin under the elastic so oddly damp and fatty yet easily creased, like gardenia petals.)
What do you think would be the proper punishment for such unruliness?
I'm sure you know that better than I, she murmured. Almost imperceptibly (but you saw it) her toes pointed a little, and her legs strained tremulously apart-just slightly-saying she was aware of you and more than aware of you-she was in your power.
It was all a kind of theater with her, but you could call her into it. You were aware-she made you aware-of your superior size, speed and cunning. You were aware of your somewhat gross-traif, uncut-but highly prized manhood, biding its confinement a little while longer. You looked down on her in her sweatshirt and little pink panties. It was theater where the two of you met, but, as Plato said of the theater, stronger and truer than life. Suddenly the squalid trailer, with its crooked Venetian blinds and grainy afternoon light, was a schoolroom in some mansion house, hung with purple velvet and gold-tasseled portieres.
Take them off and show me. You made a lazy sign-Omit-with the one forefinger, and she did as she was told. The panties fell to the floor like a bit of film. She glistened there without touching herself.
May I ask what you mean by such unruliness?
I don't know. Perhaps I'm simply hopelessly wicked.
You are headstrong.
Yes.
Are you ashamed of yourself?
Yes.
You're incorrigible.
Yes.
So that you know you require my attention?
Barely audible: Yes.
Then I suppose I have no choice but to correct you. Turn over. Rise up on your knees.
And then you did as you liked with her. It was theater but it bound you together. Afterwards she would be more than a little bad-tempered if you left her tied or held her pinned long enough for her to wake up and see herself like that. It was understandable, and usually you didn't wish to humiliate her further: You both knew she was your better, but she had sworn herself, yet again, into your power. You didn't need to hold her face in it.
Only, this time she had been so egregiously disrespectful, even perfidious: buying that horse. You could have claimed The Mahdi back now-he was still worth the price-if you had that money to spare. Or another way of looking at it: This was a small racetrack with only a couple dozen horses on the grounds worth more than a handful of peanuts. It was by no means inconceivable, or even unlikely, that her racehorse would have to run against your racehorse, and soon. You got up and left her there, tied. Her pink asshole glittered inside its sparse little wreath of whiskers like a putto's singing mouth.
Let me up, she said peevishly. You picked up the Telegraph and paced the room.
Try harder to explain to me, you said, what you mean by such unruliness.
What do you mean what do I mean? She sighed. All right, as long as you asked. Jesus, Tommy. You should have put Pelter in for fifteen hundred dollars. I have to find out from the Telegraph, yet, he's in for two grand.
Can't you see what love for you there was in that? I don't want to risk him.
But I want to risk him, for all our sakes.
Pelter can win for two thousand. Hell, he figures for twenty-five.
We came here to cash a bet. If we don't cash a bet we're just-here. Jesus Christ, will you untie me?
What's wrong with here?
You both looked around the trailer, at the yellow crinkly plastic curtains like chicken skin, at the aluminum stripping hanging down from the door of the sardine-can toilet, at the orange vinyl kitchen chairs with their crooked scars of duct tape, at the blank frame of a long-gone mirror glued to the wall, its cardboard backing smeared with black smoke-trails of glue.
You've got to be kidding. Both of you laughed.
Believe me, you can still cash a bet on Pelter at two grand.
It's not the same. You know what's going to happen, don't you? she said bitterly. He's going to run in the money and then everybody will know how good he is, whether he wins or not. Then we're stuck.
Maggie, everybody already knows how good he is.
All right. Well, I'm just trying to give myself enough to do so I won't think about it. So I won't have to leave, she said.
It was so amazingly brutal you had to sit down. You sank, and then perched rather primly on the edge of the couch, avoiding her tied hands. Out of nowhere like a wind it had come. You were so amazed to hear those words you weren't even angry at first.
Why would you want to leave? you asked. You've noticed I give you a great deal of freedom.
I have a great deal of freedom, she said. I wouldn't say you give it to me.
How can you even think of leaving me? you said, and you heard the torn off note between a whine and a sob, saw in a black flash your infant self, your naked helplessless. You had almost fallen into enemy hands. Just as you were starting to know your way about the place, you felt it shrink back together and cramp and disgorge you, cough you back up with terrible sick violence-the tomb of the lost twin. Did she know what she was doing to you, or had she herself been duped? You leaned to the latter view, but the effect was the same. You had thought her your consort and bride, and she was still that, of course. But now you saw in her, for one moment, the snarling dog at the sealed door, servant of the trolls, the keepers of the mystery.
Surely it's struck you that I never stayed very long with anyone in the past, she said sullenly.
What does that matter? you said, and now she turned her thousand-curled head and looked at you in surprise. You brought your hands to your face and breathed them. They were steeped, steeped was the right word, in the vaguely marine, amphibious smell of her. Now they circled her slender neck. Do you have any idea how easily I could kill you? you asked. She didn't answer but kept looking at you rather wakefully over her shoulder. You were scaring her. She didn't want to call it that but her nostrils flared with indignation.
You tightened your hands. Her neck was small as a cat's. One swift hard jerk is all it would take, you know, with you tied like that.
Undoubtedly, she agreed, the voice calm and cold.
She was looking at you, not like theater this time, not like rich dark nightmare lined with fur that you both inhabited. No, this time from outside. Using that fake objectivity that human beings use to seal each other out, so that, for example, they can sit next to each other without speaking on a bus. Like a cheap newspaper picture. You became aware of bad design, washed out grays and wooly whites, tedious dots per square inch. You were suddenly bored with the whole scene. Your hands fell to your sides.