He didn’t ask to sit down; he simply leaned over with his knuckles resting on the table, across the way from her, and with a quick back glance toward the door by which he had just entered, took a book out from under his jacket and put it down in front of her, its title visible.
“I sent down to New York to get this for you,” he said. “I’m trying to help you in the only way I know how.”
She glanced down at it. The title was: The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Writings.
“Who was he?” she asked, looking up. She pronounced it with the long a, as if it were an English name. “Sayd.”
“Sod,” he instructed. “He was a Frenchman. Just read the book” was all he would say. “Just read the book.”
He turned to leave her, and then he came back for a moment and added, “Don’t let anyone else see — “ Then he changed it to “Don’t let him see you with it. Put a piece of brown wrapping paper around it so the title won’t be conspicuous. As soon as you’ve finished, bring it back; don’t leave it lying around the house.”
After he’d gone she kept staring at it. Just kept staring.
They met again three days later at the same little coffee shop off the main business street. It had become their regular meeting place by now. No fixed arrangement to it; he would go in and find her there, or she would go in and find him there.
“Was he the first one?” she asked when she returned the book.
“No, of course not. This is as old as man — this getting pleasure by giving pain. There are some of them born in every generation. Fortunately not too many. He simply was the first one to write it up and so when the world became more specialized and needed a separate tag for everything, they used his name. It became a word — sadism, meaning sexual pleasure got by causing pain, the sheer pleasure of being cruel.”
She started shaking all over as if the place were drafty. “It is that.” She had to whisper it, she was so heartsick with the discovery. “Oh, God, yes, it is that.”
“You had to know the truth. That was the first thing. You had to know, you had to be told. It isn’t just a vagary or a whim on his part. It isn’t just a — well, a clumsiness or roughness in making love. This is a frightful thing, a deviation, an affliction, and — a terrible danger to you. You had to understand the truth first.”
“Sometimes he takes his electric shaver — “ She stared with frozen eyes at nowhere out before her. “He doesn’t use the shaver itself, just the cord — connects it and — “
She backed her hand into her mouth, sealing it up.
Garrett did something she’d never seen a man do before. He lowered his head, all the way over. Not just onto his chest, but all the way down until his chin was resting on the tabletop. And his eyes, looking up at her, were smoldering red with anger. But literally red, the whites all suffused. Then something wet came along and quenched the burning in them.
“Now you know what you’re up against,” he said, straightening finally. “Now what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.” She started to sob very gently, in pantomime, without a sound. He got up and stood beside her and held her head pressed against him. “I only know one thing,” she said. “I want to see the stars at night again, and not just the blackness and the shadows. I want to wake up in the morning as if it was my right, and not have to say a prayer of thanks that I lived through the night. I want to be able to tell myself there won’t be another night like the last one.”
The fear Mark had put into her had seeped and oozed into all parts of her; she not only feared fear, she even feared rescue from fear.
“I don’t want to make a move that’s too sudden,” she said in a smothered voice.
“I’ll be standing by, when you want to and when you do.”
And on that note they left each other. For one more time.
On Friday he was sitting there waiting for her at their regular table, smoking a cigarette. And another lay out in the ashtray, finished. And another. And another.
She came up behind him and touched him briefly but warmly on the shoulder, as if she were afraid to trust herself to speak.
He turned and greeted her animatedly. “Don’t tell me you’ve been in there that long! I thought you hadn’t come in yet. I’ve been sitting out here twenty minutes, watching the door for you.”
Then when she sat down opposite him and he got a good look at her face, he quickly sobered.
“I couldn’t help it. I broke down in there. I couldn’t come out any sooner. I didn’t want everyone in the place to see me, the way I was.”
She was still shaking irrepressibly from the aftermath of long-continued sobs.
“Here, have one of these,” he offered soothingly. “May make you feel better — “ He held out his cigarettes toward her.
“No!” she protested sharply, when she looked down and saw what it was. She recoiled so violently that her whole chair bounced a little across the floor. He saw the back of her hand go to the upper part of her breast in an unconscious gesture of protection, of warding off.
His face turned white when he understood the implication. White with anger, with revulsion. “So that’s it,” he breathed softly. “My God, oh, my God.”
They sat on for a long while after that, both looking down without saying anything. What was there to say? Two little cups of black coffee had arrived by now—just as an excuse for them to stay there.
Finally he raised his head, looked at her, and put words to what he’d been thinking. “You can’t go back anymore, not even once. You’re out of the house and away from it now, so you’ve got to stay out. You can’t go near it again, not even one more time. One more night may be one night too many. He’ll kill you one of these nights — he will even if he doesn’t mean to. What to him is just a thrill, an excitement, will take away your life. Think about that — you’ve got to think about that.”
“I have already,” she admitted. “Often.”
“You don’t want to go to the police?”
“I’m ashamed.” She covered her eyes reluctantly with her hand for a moment. “I know I’m not the one who should be, he’s the one. But I am nevertheless. I couldn’t bear to tell it to an outsider, to put it on record, to file a complaint — it’s so intimate. Like taking off all your clothes in public. I can hardly bring myself even to have you know about it. And I haven’t told you everything — not everything.”
He gave her a shake of the head, as though he knew.
“If I try to hide out in Pittsfield, he’ll find me sooner or later — it’s not that big a place — and come after me and force me to come back, and either way there’ll be a scandal. And I don’t want that. I couldn’t stand that. The newspapers …”
All at once, before they quite knew how it had come about, or even realized that it had come about, they were deep in the final plans, the final strategy and staging that they had been drawing slowly nearer and nearer to all these months. Nearer to with every meeting, with every look and with every word. The plans for her liberation and her salvation.
He took her hands across the table.
“No, listen. This is the way, this is how. New York. It has to be New York; he won’t be able to get you back; it’s too big; he won’t even be able to find you. The company’s holding a business conference there on Tuesday, with each of the regional offices sending a representative the way they always do. I was slated to go, long before this came up. I was going to call you on Monday before I left. But what I’m going to do now is to leave ahead of time, tonight, and take you with me.”