THE FIVE PERCENT PEOPLE
Lucy Taylor
One-fifteen in the morning at the venerable Ken-berry Arms Hotel in London.
The phone on Caleb’s side of the king-size bed jings.
I’m already wide awake, waiting for the call.
I knew it would come.
I knew she wouldn’t leave us alone.
Caleb has driven her crazy. Over the edge.
I’m close to that same edge myself, holding on by my chewed fingernails. How can any woman not go mad who gets involved with Dr. Caleb Masterton? I found the lusty postcard from the Giselle person only two days ago and have been working off my rage in the hotel gym ever since. Another five percent person for me to worry about. But more about Giselle and her hormonally charged missive later.
Caleb has already spent hours today trying to pacify Gwen the madwoman—first lunching with her in alittle bistro away from the hotel, so his fellow psychologists here for the convention wouldn’t get more fodder for the gossip mill if the pathetic creature made another scene, then strolling with her in Hyde Park while he explained in a dozen different, convoluted ways a concept I had condensed for him into three simple sentences: “I don’t love you anymore. I love someone else. It’s over.”
But with Caleb, nothing’s ever over.
The phone yips like a stepped-on terrier.
I clutch Caleb’s shoulder. “Don’t answer it. You know it’s Gwen. You’ll only make things worse if you talk to her.”
But he grumbles and gropes for the phone, mutters a sleep-garbled hello, and flops back onto the pillow. His wavy blond hair fans out across my shoulder, his hand cups and caresses my breast, while his voice shifts into his therapeutic best—alert, solicitous, conciliatory: “Please, Gwen, don’t do this. Don’t cry. Come on, you’re exhausted. We’re all exhausted. We’ve talked about this so much. Please try to get some sleep.”
I lie with my head on Caleb’s chest. I can’t hear all of the words, but I can hear Gwen Boston sobbing, screaming into the phone like an animal being tortured. It’s unbearable. I’ve despised this woman for so long, but hearing her scream, my heart breaks for her.
For myself, too, wondering how long it will be before the same sounds issue from my throat.
Oh, Caleb has a way with women, yes, he does.
Even though Gwen has been among my rivals, I hate Caleb for reducing her to this pleading, pitiable creature. I hate myself for putting up with Caleb’s adolescent egotism, for not grabbing a cab to Heathrow and getting myself back to L.A.
Even though Gwen is only a five percent person and I’m the ninety-five percent person. That’s how Caleb, the noted psychologist, darling of the lecture circuit, explained it to me. But how long will these percentages hold? I ask myself.
“Nothing for you to worry about, darling,” Caleb once said to me when I’d broken up with him after finding out he’d slept with the wife of one of his colleagues. “You’ve got me. You’re the one I love. Surely if you have ninety-five percent of me, you’re not going to quibble about the other five percent?”
He was talking about his little side dishes, his flings. It sounded almost sensible coming from his sculptured lips.
Psychology is only Caleb’s second career—his first is making women fall in love with him. Because he knows what women want, he lives up to every fantasy, when the affair begins. He makes each one feel that she is the most special, the most desirable woman in the world, that he adores and appreciates her as no man ever has. And after his conquest is thoroughly devoted to him, he lets her find out about the others, lets her know that she has fallen in love with a man too terrified of love to do anything more than gingerly, squeamishly, stick the tips of his toes into its rushing current.
Caleb has been listening to Gwen rant, trying to calm her now for almost an hour. I’m groggy, dazed, but unable to sleep, because I know before long Caleb will leave our bed and go to her.
Only a matter of time. Caleb the knight in tarnished armor riding a swaybacked steed. Off to save the damsel he’s driven to distress.
* * *
How did it come to this? My lover on the phone in the middle of the night comforting a woman he claims he never loved, a woman he made love to only as insurance against “that staleness of libido brought on by an excess of monogamy,” as he put it.
Caleb and I flew from L.A. to London for the conference on Group Dynamics in the Workplace that started two days ago. Caleb read a paper, presided over a panel of distinguished guests, and signed copies of his latest pop-psych book to gaga-eyed aficionados of the psychobabble circuit. We’ve made plans to fly to Zurich for some skiing tomorrow afternoon, then back to L.A. four days later.
Gwen, who works in administration at USC, where Caleb teaches, must have pulled up Caleb’s itinerary from the computer so she could fly to London to intercept him. I don’t think she was counting on me, though. Even though Caleb and I have been lovers for almost four years, Gwen always seems astonished to see me with him at these academic gatherings. Doesn’t she realize by now that I may not be his only woman but I’m his primary one? Does nothing discourage her, humiliate her sufficiently that she will give him up?
She threw a scene while Caleb and I were checking in, clutching his arm, demanding in a high-pitched, mortifyingly shrill voice to know what I was doing here. People stared, and Caleb squirmed.
I suspect, however, that underneath his veneer of embarrassed concern, Caleb relishes this. Sturm und drang, after all, is his milk and honey. Being at the center of the tempest gets him hard. A drama queen in tweed and wing-tipped Guccis.
I get up and pace around our plushly appointed suite, peer out the windows, peruse the contents of themini-bar. My fingers drift across the top of the suitcase in which Caleb has packed our toys: lengths of strong nylon rope that won’t chafe wrists or ankles, a blindfold and a gag, a darling little cat-o-’nine-tails we picked up in an L.A. sex shop. The bondage gear is used on me alone; I’ve offered to tie Caleb up, but he only makes a joke of it: “You know you can’t tie a decent knot, darling.”
I stroke the leather whip, imagine cramming the handle down Gwen’s throat until her face turns purple.
On the phone, Caleb is purring, “No, no, Alicia doesn’t hate you. She’s concerned for you. She’s genuinely worried.”
I remember Mama warning me when I was a kid that you could never trust a woman. They’d lie to you, stab you in the back, talk as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth when they met you face-to-face but choose their adjectives for strychnine content when they talked behind your back.
I never understood why Mama said that. She was a woman, and I was growing up to be one. Why did she think so little of her own sex?
Later, of course, I learned that Mama was Daddy’s second wife. She’d stolen him away from his first wife while she was working as a legal secretary in Daddy’s office. So naturally she viewed women as sharks, being of the marriage-wrecking sort herself.
But I know not all women conform to that ugly stereotype. I think about my women friends, caring and supportive women who understand the sad reality that male usefulness and comfort often extend no further than the end of the man’s dick. If only women wouldstick together, I think, not put men up on pedestals we polish with our tongues while we destroy ourselves and each other like wild dogs fighting over scraps.
What about me? Am I ready to offer sisterly support to Gwen?
Oh, God, I want to but…
I crawl back into bed, find Caleb has stroked himself erect. His azure eyes meet mine. Lust thrills through me like electric shock. I slide down between his legs. My lips close over his cock and vacuum it down my throat. Sucking Caleb’s cock, one of life’s little ecstasies. His fingers close in my hair. Compassion melts. I want to shout at the phone, “Listen to these slurping noises, Gwen. Do you know what I’m doing?” But my mouth is too full of Caleb to speak.
I admit Gwen Boston was the last thing on my mind while Caleb and I were flying to London. I had other worries then. The night before we left L.A., I’d found a postcard lying atop a pile of graduate theses on Caleb’s desk. It showed a gauzy-eyed, zaftig nude lounging on a brocade-covered couch. “Caleb, darling, I miss you fiercely,” read the flowery, curlicued script. “What serendipity that you should have called the other day—when I was lying on a couch very much like this one.” It was dated the month before and postmarked Albany, New York, where Caleb was guest speaker at a convention on codependency last month. He said I shouldn’t bother going. Wouldn’t be any fun, he said. No time to play.
Is that what you said to Giselle, I wonder, to make her miss you fiercely?
When I confronted Caleb about the card, he only lifted up my hair, nuzzling the back of my neck whilemurmuring, “You’re the one I’m with, the one I love. Remember how we’ve talked about that other five percent? Nothing for you to be jealous of. Less than five percent, really. Never even had sex with the woman, not real sex. She’s phobic about germs. Just blow jobs. Truly, that was all it was.”
The hell of it is I can’t even pay Caleb back by making him jealous. He protects his ego by insisting he does not feel jealousy which, to my mind, is akin to lepers who can poke a finger in the fire and not feel pain: no sign of health, this, but quite the opposite, the numbing out of something vital. He claims he doesn’t mind if I indulge in my own peccadilloes. Sauce for the goose and all that tommyrot. But when I tried to ease the hurt of Caleb’s infidelities by cheating on him, I found it only made things more painful. The words “I made love with so-and-so” sound so tepid, so pristine, leagues away from the moaning, rutting reality of a lusty, sweaty, musky, penetrating fuck.
Leave him, I think. Punish him, make him pay.
But whenever I’ve left Caleb in the past, the only one who seems to pay is me.
Because the good times with Caleb are extraordinary. He’s lusty and witty and generous; he attends to all the little things, both in and out of bed; knows how to fuck a woman forty-seven different ways. And add to that all the little erotic garnishes that he’s proficient in, all those little things I crave—the scarves and knots, the sting of leather now and then. He’s past forty, but still blond and tawny, sleek as Secretariat in his prime, the eternal adolescent, rock star bronze. He’s Peter Pan, and, yes, I know, a book was written about that type of man. Look what happened to Wendy!
Caleb shoves the phone into the pillow as he spasms into my mouth. He takes a deep breath, puts the phone back to his ear, and resumes his soothing patter. I rest my cheek on his flaccid cock, inhaling the sultry musk of come.
I understand Gwen’s obsession.
I weep for her at the same time that I hate her.
He will destroy us both.
Caleb hangs the phone up and hoists himself out of bed.
“Only be a few minutes,” he says, climbing into his pants. “Got to go calm her down.”
“You’ve spent the whole goddamn night calming her down!”
He leans over, takes my face in his hands. “Please try to understand. We don’t want a scandal. Those tight-asses in the department back in L.A. would adore a scandal.”
I can barely hear his words for the sharp static of fear sizzling behind my temples. Caleb is leaving me to go to Gwen. Caleb is leaving.
“Don’t go. Don’t give her what she wants. You’ll only make it worse.”
He pats my cheek. “Got to, love. Only be a few minutes. Just going to meet her on the mezzanine. Have a little chat, hold her hand. There, that’s a dear.”
And then he’s gone.
The ticking of the clock sounds like the timing device on a bomb. Ten past two. Now ten past three. Three-twenty. I’ve tried watching late night TV—CNN and wacky British sitcoms. I’ve even masturbated twice to orgasm, but sleep is still as unlikely as lunch with Princess Di. I get out of bed, go to the windows and open the middle one. Gaze down at the occasional taxi passing below, then yank it shut. I dial the all-night coffee shop on the mezzanine. The gravelly voiced woman who picks up the phone says no one is there. I hang up.
Where is he, then?
A terrible thought rocks me. He wouldn’t have, he didn’t. Surely he wouldn’t be so foolish as to—I pick up the phone and dial Gwen’s room.
She answers, sniffing pitifully.
“Put Caleb on,” I tell her.
He answers.
My adrenaline is pumping as if I’m about to rush into a burning building. I’m almost stuttering with rage.
“You’re really pushing it, Caleb. Get out of that woman’s room. Get back here now.”
He agrees.
A triumph—I have never talked to Caleb like that. I rather like myself for doing it, but I’m scared, too.
I get more scared as the minutes pass and Caleb doesn’t return.
I call again. This time no one answers.
Visions of Caleb and Gwen in one last carnal meltdown fill my head, a final bounce, the sexual equivalent of that last drink—“just this one for the road”—that the alcoholic says before every bender.
I put on my nightgown and Caleb’s silk robe, grab the room key, and head for the elevator. Gwen is on the fourth floor, seven floors below ours.
I pound on the door, bracing myself for what I may find. Caleb finally opens the door.
“Jesus, Alicia, what are you—”
I rush past him into the room, which is empty, then investigate the bathroom. And stop. Gwen is in her bra and half-slip on her knees by the commode. Blood streams down her forearms. A pool of blood rubies around her knees.
“Dear God.”
Caleb grabs me by the shoulders, pivots me away from the bathroom. “Christ, Alicia,” he hisses “there’s no need for you to see this. Get back to the room.”
“My God, she tried to kill herself. We ought to call an ambulance.”
“No, no, it’s not serious. Not very, anyway. She’s done this before. She only cuts enough to make a mess, look like she’s bleeding to death. More for effect than anything.”
Gwen overhears this diminishment of her injuries. She howls.
“Why now?” I ask. “What happened?”
“I said I never really loved her. I told her I only said it to get her into bed.”
“Let me talk to her.”
I go in the bathroom where Gwen has wedged herself between the toilet and the sink, stanching the flow of her blood with one of the hotel’s plush terrycloth towels. There’s blood on her bare feet, on the tile, blood dappling her thin stubbly calves. This is not the way I think of Gwen: defeated, demolished, destroyed.
I squat beside her. “He isn’t worth it, you know.”
She looks up through bloodshot blue eyes. “I know.”
“So why don’t you give him up?”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because I’m the one he’s with, darling.”
She rallies enough to sneer at me. “Your turn will come. He does this to everyone. He’ll do it to you, too.”
As if I’m so inebriated with desire that I haven’t realized this. It’s part of the ongoing despair I live with, part of the turmoil that wakes me in the night with the feeling that the sword of Damocles has turned into a giant penis about to smash down on my head.
“Do you want a doctor?”
From the other room, Caleb calls, “No, no doctors. She doesn’t need a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” echoes Gwen.
“But you’re still bleeding.”
“I don’t care. He doesn’t love me. I want to die.”
“That’s nonsense.” I want to slap her till she wakes up from this trance of despair, this hideous bewitchment. “He isn’t worth this, Gwen. Can’t you see?”
She looks at me with haunted, yearning eyes. “He is, he is. I’d die for him.”
Christ. Sprawled bloody and disheveled on the tiles, she looks like the heroine of a bad bodice ripper. Caleb comes to the door. “Let me talk to her, Alicia.”
I stand up. “What’s left to say? You’ve been talking to her night and day ever since we got here, and the only thing that’s changed is that now she’s slashed her wrists.”
“Cut her wrists, Alicia. They’re only cut.”
“Dammit, she opened up her flesh with a razor blade. I don’t give a shit what verb you use to describe it.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Damn you.”
He touches his fingertips to my cheeks, brushes his lips to my mouth. I can feel his kiss all the way down to my clit.
“Only a few more minutes,” whispers Caleb. “Just to make sure she doesn’t try it again after I leave. Please.”
Caleb returns to our room an hour later, looking as drained and exhausted as a man who’s been standing on a scaffold waiting to hang.
“How is she?”
“Better now. She’s sleeping.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That everything’s going to be all right.”
I sit up on my elbows. “But everything’s not going to be all right. She’s obsessed with you. And as long as you go running every time she calls, it’s never going to end.”
“No, she’ll calm down. I told her I’d see her when we got back to L.A. We’d talk it out.”
“What’s left to say?”
“Please, Alicia, I’ve heard enough bitching for one night.”
“But what can you possibly say to her? Either it’s over or it isn’t. There is no middle ground!”
His eyeballs dart around in their sockets. “She only wants to maintain our friendship.”
“Meaning a platonic friendship?”
“Well, no, not exactly.”
“God damn you!” I hurl myself against him, flailing with my fists. He throws me back onto the bed, pins me down. The rage empowering my muscles goes between my legs. This is how it feels when Caleb tiesme to the bed. How can hatred and desire merge so easily?
“She’ll never mean anything to me, darling,” he murmurs. “She never did; she never will.”
His legs pry mine apart. He slides inside, a perfect fit. I feel the temporary, blissful merging of the boundaries that should define us, an end to the separateness of our skin.
“I love you, don’t you know that?” he whispers, and, oh, I want to believe him. I need to believe him, because I love him, too.
Four-fifteen: the phone.
I roll over, tears springing to my eyes. “Jesus, I thought you were going to ask the operator not to put through any more calls.”
“If I had, she’d just come to the door.”
“Then you call the police.”
“Alicia …” His tone of voice suggests that I’ve just advised him to toss gasoline on Gwen and light a match.
Caleb picks up the phone.
At first I can tell she’s talking calmly, Caleb making his reassuring little hmms and uhhs. While he listens to her, he puts his arm around me, strokes my hair. His hand feels so good, I want him to slide his fingers through my skin and caress the slippery, soft interior of my heart.
“No,” says Caleb. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
The noise that comes through the phone is enough to make me jump and burrow my head in Caleb’s armpit. Raw screaming, sobbing. As if she’s being flailed.
“No, please, Gwen it’s so very late, and Alicia and I are exhausted. Please, can’t it wait till tomorrow? There’ll be time, yes … I’ll see you before we leave for Heathrow. No, Gwen, what would your coming to our room solve?”
I bolt up on my elbows.
“She wants to come here? No, absolutely not. This is my room too.”
“No, Alicia isn’t upset. She’s only … she’s just tired. I told you, no, it wouldn’t be a good idea.”
But I know it’s only a matter of time. Caleb won’t hang up the phone. Gwen will continue sobbing. With or without my permission, he will allow her to come to our room.
“Ten minutes,” he tells me as he hangs up the phone. “That’s all she wants. Ten minutes.”
“To do what? To say what? Jesus, this is driving me crazy.”
“Just to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself again.” He takes me in his arms.
A timid knock.
She slinks into our room wearing a fuchsia Chinese nightgown and tangerine slippers. Her wrists are bandaged. She clutches her arms across her chest and shivers as though she’s entering a freezer. She looks at me sprawled naked on the bed and quickly turns away.
“What did you think, Gwen,” I say, “that we slept in separate beds? Did you think we were just sharing the room to save money?”
Caleb winces. “Alicia, please …”
I get up out of bed and stride across the room. Let her get a good long look. Whatever else she does to deal with her pain, she doesn’t exorcise it with barbells and StairMasters. I meet her gaze and then slide into my robe.
“I love him,” whimpers Gwen.
“But don’t you understand?” I do something odd then, something that surprises even me. I stroke her hair. Stroke it like maybe her mother should have done, or her father, somebody who cared about her, who could have taught her to respect herself back when it would have mattered. I know all this, because no one did those things for me. That’s what brought me to Caleb. “You have to give him up, Gwen. He doesn’t love you, sweetheart.”
“He doesn’t love you, either.”
That’s something I loathe considering, but it’s definitely possible. The postcard from Giselle of the baroque script. Plump, pink-bosomed nude reclining like a purring cat: “Miss you fiercely.”
Oh, Caleb, why? If you’ve got to have multiple women, then why not hookers, who wouldn’t love you, wouldn’t care? Why not well-married women bored with their husbands and looking for a lark? Why not a bold but straightforward ad: “Unavailable male seeks same in woman for frenzied bouts of uncommitted lust.”
But Caleb only desires women whom he senses are needy, lonely, empty at their core, women who will fall in love with him and not be able to let go. Something about their hopeless, yearning love, makes him feel worthy, powerful.
Gwen collapses in a chair by the bed, dabbing at her puffy eyes. She stares at me with venom. “I don’t see why we can’t share him. You one night, me the next.”
An arrangement I’m afraid Caleb might actually consider.
“Because he doesn’t want you anymore, sweet thing. You were only a five percent person to begin with.”
Before Gwen can ask what I mean by that, Caleb interrupts, asking if she’ll have a drink.
“It’ll help you relax, love. Scotch?”
“I hate Scotch.” She turns to me. “What did you mean by five percent?”
“Vodka, then. I think I saw some Smirnoff in the mini-bar.”
But Gwen won’t be deterred. “Five percent? What does that mean? That I’m only five percent of your love life, Caleb? That I’m of so little significance? Did you really say that?”
“Will you please lower your voice, Gwen?”
While Caleb pretends this is a cocktail party, I feel a monster headache surging up behind my forehead. I go into the bathroom, erase the smudged mascara from below my eyes with baby oil, and gulp some aspirin.
Coming out of the bathroom, I feel cold air swirl around my knees and feet, a chilly exhalation slightly tainted with exhaust.
The bedroom looks empty. No sign of Gwen. The middle window is wide open.
Oh, please, I think, please, but I don’t know if I’m praying for her safety or her death.
I look down first and see nothing but the solid blackness of the street eleven stories down. Then I hear her. She’s sobbing softly, about ten feet away.
Out on the ledge.
“Oh, Jesus, Gwen what have you done?”
“If I’m only five percent, then I’d be better off dead. And if you call the police, I’ll jump. I swear it.”
Caleb pokes his head out the window beside mine. “Holy Christ, Gwen, get in here.” He extends his hand, but it doesn’t even begin to close the distance between them. “Don’t do this, Gwen.”
“I have to. You don’t love me. I want to die.”
I wonder if the others on this floor can hear this fervid discourse, but then, we occupy a corner room and those in the adjacent rooms, quite sensibly, surely must have their windows shut on this chilly night. I wonder if I should call the police anyway. I wonder if she’ll do it. I wonder if… Oh, Christ, I wonder if Caleb will love me better if she’s dead.
“Now listen, sweetheart,” I hear Caleb saying in his best soothing, avuncular, Daddy-comforting-little-girl-with-skinned-knee tone of voice, “Nothing is worth this. I’m not worth this. You don’t want to die.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I don’t want you to die.”
“I don’t give a shit what you want. You don’t love me.”
“Gwen, honey, what have I been doing all evening? What have I been doing all weekend? Trying to reassure you that everything’s going to be all right.”
“But it isn’t! It won’t ever be all right! You don’t want me, you want her.”
Yeah, he wants me, I think.
And he wants Giselle, of the overheated postcards, and he wants the waitress with the kewpie doll mouth and vacuumed-looking eyes who brought us tea and toast this morning, and he even wants the pearshaped journalist with a nose so juttingly ethnic that it would be un-p.c. to even mention it, who clucked questions at Caleb over her pudgy belly at the airport the other day.
He wants them all, because they’re all Erections, past, present, and future, the Muses of his preening masturbation, the proof that he’s not invisible, but loved. He’s bulimic about love. He sucks it up, then pukes it out, finds another lover, and repeats the cycle.
“Look, darling,” I hear Caleb coaxing as he leans far out the window, “I promise you something. Word of honor. If you’ll come in right now, we’ll go to your room. We’ll spend what’s left of the night together and tomorrow, too. I love you, Gwen. I’ll make this up to you. I’ll—”
I grab Caleb by the arm, pull him away from the window.
“What the fuck are you telling her?”
“Jesus, Alicia, surely you can’t think anything I say right now means anything. I’ll promise to have her name tattooed on my dick if it’ll get her back in the fucking room. Think of it, Alicia, if she jumps. Think what people will say.”
“But do you mean it? Do you love her?”
“Christ Jesus, no. If she were standing out on somebody else’s ledge, I’d be down below yelling ‘Jump!’ Believe me, there’s nothing for you to worry about. She means nothing to me. She’s a pain and a pest and doesn’t even give good head.”
Why is it this doesn’t reassure me?
Oh, Gwen, you little idiot, why are you out there on that ledge? You don’t deserve to die. Come in, come in, come in.
“I hate you,” she’s sobbing. “You don’t love me, you never did. All you’ve done is tell me lies.” Her sobs are like the keening of women I heard once in a funeral procession in Mexico.
“Just listen to me, darling. You’re terrifying me. I love you, Gwen, I truly do. I was only trying to appease Alicia when I said I didn’t. Believe me, won’t you? Come take my hand. Come inside.”
She sniffles, coughs, then mumbles in a tiny voice, “I don’t want to die.”
“Of course you don’t, and you aren’t going to. You’re going to inch closer, very, very carefully. Slowly. You’re going to take my hand and—”
“I’m afraid to move.”
“Take my hand.”
“I’m so afraid.”
“You’re going to be all right, my love,” Caleb says. “I’m going to step away from the window now, but—”
“No,” she screeches. “You’re going to call the police.”
“No police,” says Caleb. “Word of honor. Two seconds, darling. Two. I’ll be right back.”
Caleb seizes my arm. “She’s almost close enough to grab. I’m going to try to pull her in. I’m going to get her hand, to—”
“No! It’s a trick! She’ll jump and pull you down with her. She wants to kill you both.”
“I’m not going out onto the ledge. You think I’m demented? I’m not going to die for that bitch. I’m going to lean out the window and catch her hand. But first I want you to tie me to the headboard of the bed with the ropes, just in case you’re right, in case she tries to pull me down with her.”
“Let her come in on her own, Caleb.”
“I’ve got to do something. What if she jumps? How will it look?”
“Who gives a shit?”
“I do. My career—”
“Fuck your career.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you say that.”
Gwen moans, “I’m getting dizzy! I’m going to fall!”
“The ropes! Go get them—hurry!”
Caleb’s suitcase is a mess. I frantically rummage through it, throwing things out onto the floor. I find the nylon ropes, but something else as well—an airline ticket and a card. I can barely read the note that’s scrawled inside the card, for the tears blurring my vision, but when Caleb yells, I grab the ropes and run back to the window.
“Here.” He loops the rope under his arms and twice around his chest, staying beside the window so Gwen can see and hear him as he tries to talk her in. I run back to the bed and tie him to the headboard, which looks sturdy enough to support the weight of a small car.
Meanwhile, Caleb is leaning out the window, one knee on the ledge, reaching toward Gwen, whose pale hand is now extended toward his. Not making contact—yet.
Gwen, my enemy.
I see Caleb’s back and torso, leaning out the window. Into the void. Trusting his weight to the rope. Leaning away.
Farther and farther.
The man I want. The man I love.
“Caleb, wait!”
But my cry does not come soon enough.
He doesn’t reach Gwen’s outstretched hand. He teeters, spins, tries to regain his balance, can’t, then bellows as the rope lets go, flies past him out into thedark like a cracking whip and drops, with Caleb plunging after it.
Gwen doesn’t scream as Caleb plummets. For a moment I think she’s fallen, too.
Then suddenly she tumbles in through the open window, shaking, sobbing. She collapses into my arms.
“He fell,” she gasps. “He fell trying to save me.”
“Yes, he did his best,” I say. “He fell.”
I could have shown her the plane ticket from Albany to Caleb’s next conference, in Jacksonville, and the note accompanying it: “To my dear Giselle. You’re the only one. I’m going to prove it to you. Soon.”
I could have told Gwen that he died because the rope that was meant to anchor him came loose—because, as Caleb always said, I can’t tie a decent knot, especially when my hands are quivering with rage.
But I say nothing.
Gwen stares up at me. Her blue eyes are glassy, manic, like circles of bright crayon. “He loved me, you know. He said he did. He loved me.”
“He loved you,” I repeat. “He loved us both.”
Then I stroke her hair and hold her, smelling Caleb on her skin, while we wait for the police to come, while I pray that in time we may be free of him.