Stephen King - Gerald’s Game

Jessie could hear the back door banging lightly, randomly, in the October breeze blowing around the house. The jamb always swelled in the fall and you really had to give the door a yank to shut it. This time they had forgotten. She thought of telling Gerald to go back and shut the door before they got too involved or that banging would drive her nuts. Then she thought how ridiculous that would be, given the current circumstances. It would ruin the whole mood.

What mood?

A good question, that. And as Gerald turned the hollow barrel of the key in the second lock, as she heard the minute click from above her left ear, she realized that, for her at least, the mood wasnt worth preserving. That was why she had noted the unlatched door in the first place, of course. For her, the sexual turn-on of the bondage games hadnt lasted long.

The same could not be said of Gerald, however. He was wearing only a pair of Jockey shorts now, and she didnt have to look as high as his face to see that his interest continued unabated.

This is stupid, she thought, but stupid wasnt the whole story, either. It was also a little scary. She didnt like to admit it, but there it was.

Gerald, why dont we just forget this?

He hesitated for a moment, frowning a little, then went on across the room to the dresser which stood to the left of the bathroom door. His face cleared as he went. She watched him from where she lay on the bed, her arms raised and splayed out, making her look a little like Fay Wray chained up and waiting for the great ape in King Kong. Her wrists had been secured to the mahogany bed-posts with two sets of handcuffs. The chains gave each hand about six inches worth of movement. Not much.

He put the keys on top of the bureau-two minute clicks, her ears seemed in exceptionally fine working order for a Wednesday afternoon-and then turned back to her. Over his head, sunripples from the lake danced and wavered on the bedrooms high white ceiling.

What do you say? This has lost a lot of its charm for me. Andit never had that much to begin with, she did not add.

He grinned. He had a heavy, pink-skinned face below a narrow widows peak of hair as black as a crows wing, and that grin of his had always done something to her that she didnt much care for. She couldnt quite put her finger on what that something was, but-

Oh, sure you can. It makes him look stupid. You can practically seehis IQ going down ten points for every inch that grin spreads. At itsmaximum width, your killer corporate lawyer of a husband looks like ajanitor on work-release from the local mental institution.

That was cruel, but not entirely inaccurate. But how did you tell your husband of almost twenty years that every time he grinned he looked as if he were suffering from light mental retardation? The answer was simple, of course: you didnt. His smile was a different matter entirely. He had a lovely smile-she guessed it was that smile, so warm and good-humored, which had persuaded her to go out with him in the first place. It had reminded her of her fathers smile when he told his family amusing things about his day as he sipped a before-dinner gin and tonic.

This wasnt the smile, though. This was the grin-a version of it he seemed to save just for these sessions. She had an idea that to Gerald, who was on the inside of it, the grin felt wolfish. Piratical, maybe. From her angle, however, lying here with her arms raised above her head and nothing on but a pair of bikini panties, it only looked stupid. No retarded. He was, after all, no devil-may-care adventurer like the ones in the mens magazines over which he had spent the furious ejaculations of his lonely, overweight puberty; he was an attorney with a pink, too-large face spreading below a widows peak which was narrowing relentlessly toward total baldness. just an attorney with a hard-on poking the front of his undershorts out of shape. And only moderately out of shape, at that.

The size of his erection wasnt the important thing, though. The important thing was the grin. It hadnt changed a bit, and that meant Gerald hadnt taken her seriously. She was supposed to protest; after all, that was the game.

Gerald? I mean it.

The grin widened. A few more of his small, inoffensive attorneys teeth came into view; his IQ tumbled another twenty or thirty points. And he still wasnt hearing her.

Are you sure of that?

She was. She couldnt read him like a book-she supposed it took a lot more than seventeen years of marriage to get to that point-but she thought she usually had a pretty good idea of what was going through his head. She thought something would be seriously out of whack if she didnt.

If thats the truth, toots, how come he cant read you? How come hecant see this isnt just a new scene in the same old sex-farce?

Now it was her turn to frown slightly. She had always heard voices inside her head-she guessed everyone did, although people usually didnt talk about them, any more than they talked about their bowel functions-and most of them were old friends, as comfortable as bedroom slippers. This one, however, was new and there was nothing comfortable about it. It was a strong voice, one that sounded young and vigorous. It also sounded impatient. Now it spoke again, answering its own question.

It isnt that he cant read you; its just that sometimes, toots, he doesntwant to.

Gerald, really-I dont feet like it. Bring the keys back and unlock me. Well do something else. Ill get on top, if you want. Or you can just lie there with your hands behind your head and Ill do you, you know, the other way.

Are you sure you want to do that? the new voice asked. Are youreally sure you want to have any sex with this man?

Jessie closed her eyes, as if she could make the voice shut up by doing that. When she opened them again, Gerald was standing at the foot of the bed, the front of his shorts jutting like the prow of a ship. Well some kids toy boat, maybe. His grin had widened further, exposing the last few teeth-the ones with the gold fillings-on both sides. She didnt just dislike that dumb grin, she realized; she despised it.

I will let you up if youre very, very good. Can you be very, very good, Jessie?

Corny, the new no-bullshit voice commented. Tres corny.

He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underpants like some absurd gunslinger. The jockeys went down pretty fast once they got past his not-inconsiderable love handles. And there it was, exposed. Not the formidable engine of love she had first encountered as a teenager in the pages of Fanny Hill but something meek and pink and circumcised; five inches of completely unremarkable erection. Two or three years ago, on one of her infrequent trips to Boston, she had seen a movie called The Belly of an Architect. She thought, Right. And now Im looking at The Penis of anAttorney. She had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep from laughing. Laughing at this point would be impolitic.

An idea came to her then, and it killed any urge shed had to laugh. It was this: he didnt know she was serious because for him, Jessie Mahout Burlingame, wife of Gerald, sister of Maddy and Will, daughter of Tom and Sally, mother of no one, was really not here at all. She had ceased to be here when the keys made their small, steely clicks in the locks of the handcuffs. The mens adventure magazines of Geralds teenage years had been replaced by a pile of skin magazines in the bottom drawer of his desk, magazines in which women wearing pearls and nothing else knelt on bearskin rugs while men with sexual equipment that made Geralds look strictly HO-scale by comparison took them from behind. In the backs of these magazines, between the talk-dirty-to-me phone ads with their 900 numbers, were ads for inflatable women which were supposed to be anatomically correct-a bizarre concept if Jessie had ever encountered one. She thought of those air-filled dollies now, their pink skins, lineless cartoon bodies, and featureless faces, with a kind of revelatory amazement. It wasnt horror-not quite-but an intense light flashed on inside her, and the landscape it disclosed was certainly more frightening than this stupid game, or the fact that this time they were playing it in the summer house by the lake long after summer had run away for another year.