“I imagine you’re right.” Ballard managed to get to his feet without staggering. Slow-moving blood continued to ooze down his left side.
“We have to get you on the table,” Sandrine said. “Hold this over the wound for right now, okay?”
She handed him a folded white napkin, and he clamped it over his side. “Sorry. I’m not as good at stitches as you are.”
“I’ll be fine,” Ballard said, and began moving, a bit haltingly, toward the next room.
“Oh, sure. You always are. But you know what I like about what we just did?”
For once he had no idea what she might say. He waited for it.
“That amazing food we loved so much was Toucan! Who would’ve guessed? You’d think Toucan would taste sort of like chicken, only a lot worse.”
“Life is full of surprises.”
In the bedroom, Ballard kicked off his shoes, pulled his trousers down over his hips, and stepped out of them.
“You can leave your socks on,” said Sandrine, “but let’s get your undies off, all right?”
“I need your help.”
Sandrine grasped the waistband of his boxers and pulled them down, but they snagged on his penis. “Ballard is aroused, surprise number two.” She unhooked his shorts, let them drop to the floor, batted his erection down, and watched it bounce back up. “Barkis is willin’, all right.”
“Let’s get into the workroom,” he said.
“Aye aye, mon capitaine.” Sandrine closed her hand on his erection and said, “Want to go there on-deck, give the natives a look at your magnificent manliness? Shall we increase the index of penis envy among the river tribes by a really big factor?”
“Let’s just get in there, okay?”
She pulled him into the workroom and only then released his erection.
A wheeled aluminum tray had been rolled up beside the worktable. Sometimes it was not given to them, and they were forced to do their work with their hands and whatever implements they had brought with them. Today, next to the array of knives of many kinds and sizes, cleavers, wrenches, and hammers lay a pack of surgical thread and a stainless steel needle still warm from the autoclave.
Ballard sat down on the worktable, pushed himself along until his heels had cleared the edge, and lay back. Sandrine threaded the needle and, bending over to get close to the wound, began to do her patient stitching.
1982
“Oh, here you are,” said Sandrine, walking into the sitting room of their suite to find Ballard lying on one of the sofas, reading a book whose title she could not quite make out. Because both of his hands were heavily bandaged, he was having some difficulty turning the pages. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
He glanced up, frowning. “All over? Does that mean you went down the stairs?”
“No, of course not. I wouldn’t do anything like that alone, anyhow.”
“And just to make sure…. You didn’t go up the stairs, either, did you?”
Sandrine came toward him, shaking her head. “No, I’d never do that, either. But I want to tell you something. I thought you might have decided to take a look upstairs. By yourself, to sort of protect me in a way I never want to be protected.”
“Of course,” Ballard said, closing his book on an index finger that protruded from the bulky white swath of bandage. “You’d hate me if I ever tried to protect you, especially by doing something sneaky. I knew that about you when you were fifteen years old.”
“When I was fifteen, you did protect me.”
He smiled at her. “I exercised an atypical amount of restraint.”
His troublesome client, Sandrine’s father, had told him one summer day that a business venture required him to spend a week in Mexico City. Could he think of anything acceptable that might occupy his daughter during that time, she being a teenager a bit too prone to independence and exploration? Let her stay with me, Ballard had said. The guest room has its own bathroom and a TV. I’ll take her out to theaters at night, and to the Met and Moma during the day when I’m not doing my job. When I am doing my job, she can bat around the city by herself the way she does now. Extraordinary man you are, the client had said, and allow me to reinforce that by letting you know that about a month ago my daughter just amazed me one morning by telling me that she liked you. You have no idea how god-damned fucking unusual that is. That she talked to me at all is staggering, and that she actually announced that she liked one of my friends is stupefying. So yes, please, thank you, take Sandrine home with you, please do, escort her hither and yon.
When the time came, he drove a compliant Sandrine to his house in Harrison, where he explained that although he would not have sex with her until she was at least eighteen, there were many other ways they could express themselves. And although it would be years before they could be naked together, for the present they would each be able to be naked before the other. Fifteen-year-old Sandrine, who had been expecting to use all her arts of bad temper, insult, duplicity, and evasiveness to escape ravishment by this actually pretty interesting old guy, responded to these conditions with avid interest. Ballard announced another prohibition no less serious, but even more personal.
“I can’t cut myself any more?” she asked. “Fuck you, Ballard, you loved it when I showed you my arm. Did my father put you up to this?” She began looking frantically for her bag, which Ballard’s valet had already removed to the guest rooms.
“Not at all. Your father would try to kill me if he knew what I was going to do to you. And you to me, when it’s your turn.”
“So if I can’t cut myself, what exactly happens instead?”
“I cut you,” Ballard said. “And I do it a thousand times better than you ever did. I’ll cut you so well no one ever be able to tell it happened, unless they’re right on top of you.”
“You think I’ll be satisfied with some wimpy little cuts no one can even see? Fuck you all over again.”
“Those cuts no one can see will be incredibly painful. And then I’ll take the pain away, so you can experience it all over again.”
Sandrine found herself abruptly caught up by a rush of feelings that seemed to originate in a deep region located just below her ribcage. At least for the moment, this flood of unnamable emotions blotted out her endless grudges and frustrations, also the chronic bad temper they engendered.
“And during this process, Sandrine, I will become deeply familiar, profoundly familiar with your body, so that when at last we are able to enjoy sex with each other, I will know how to give you the most amazing pleasure. I’ll know every inch of you, I’ll have your whole gorgeous map in my head. And you will do the same with me.”
Sandrine had astonished herself by agreeing to this program on the spot, even to abstain from sex until she turned eighteen. Denial, too, was a pain she could learn to savor. At that point Ballard had taken her upstairs to her the guest suite, and soon after down the hallway to what he called his “workroom.”
“Oh my God,” she said, taking it in, “I can’t believe it. This is real. And you, you’re real, too.”
“During the next three years, whenever you start hating everything around you and feel as though you’d like to cut yourself again, remember that I’m here. Remember that this room exists. There’ll be many days and nights when we can be here together.”
In this fashion had Sandrine endured the purgatorial remainder of her days at Dalton. And when she and Ballard at last made love, pleasure and pain had become presences nearly visible in the room at the moment she screamed in the ecstasy of release.