Chosen Prey

now tried with Barstad. He’d found it, ultimately, to be boring. It was the killing, he thought, and it felt fine —fine— to have that clarified.
    He searched for a metaphor. His realization of the exact nature of the beast was, he decided, the psychological equivalent of the first taste of a great French white wine, properly cool, properly tart; a bit of an intellectual tangle, perhaps, but there was a wonderfully clear, clean response at the sensual level.
    He wanted another one.
    Barstad.
    They were meeting twice a week and the sex had gone past strenuous, lurching off into the weeds of intricate variation. He was not so much entertained as amazed, he thought. The last time they met, he’d spanked her with the Ping-Pong paddles until her ass was fiery red, yet she seemed to feel that he’d done an inadequate job. The pain, she said, had been on the very periphery of her pleasure, rather than at the center, where it should have been. She sounded, he thought, like a French literary theorist writing on sex.
    Today, he thought, things would be different. He had the starter rope in his back pocket when he arrived at her apartment, and a duffle bag and spade in the backseat of the car. He would bury her so far out in the countryside that she would never be found. If the police wanted to attribute her disappearance to the gravedigger, he thought, let them do it.
    He no longer cared. The power was in him. He even enjoyed his new media appellation: “the gravedigger.” All right. He whistled as the elevator took him up to Barstad’s.
     
    S HE WAS NUDE when she met him at the door: propped it open with one arm and posed, her eyelids drooping. “James,” she said. “I’ve already started.”
    “I see that,” he said. “And I’ve got a new movie,” she said. “A DVD. I pushed the couch back so we could put the futon in front of the TV.”
    Sex first, he thought. First the sex, and when he’d been emptied out of all the stray emotions that sex seemed to dissolve, he could better appreciate the clear, cool strangulation. There was, he thought, an aesthetic to it all.
    They began with the movie and masturbation, moved on to oral sex, and then the intricacies. He found his mind wandering in the middle of it all, and he looked down at her neck below him and then around for his pants. They were out of reach, and he was unable to detach himself at the moment. He continued, looking down at her neck and the fine groove of her spine, thrilled already by what was coming. . . .
    She finished, and he did, and they lay side by side, her head on his shoulder. She always wanted a long second bout, had even urged him toward chemical reinforcement. He would have another opportunity with the rope. What, he thought, would it be like to strangle a woman who was at that moment in the throes of orgasm? Would she stop? Would he?
    “James,” she murmured into his neck, “I am going to make you very, very unhappy. If you want to punish me, I would accept that. But I want you to hear me out first.”
    He pulled back, said nothing. What was this?
    “It’s time to enter a new stage of exploration,” she said. She’d always been formal about the sex, as though she were filling out a lab book. What would she do when she got to the end, when she’d exhausted all the possibilities? Build hot rods? Write Haiku? “I’ve been talking to a woman that I’ve known for several years. She has had some sexual relationships with other women, and we have decided that we would like to explore that together. Intergender sexuality.”
    He looked down at her, flabbergasted again. “You want to try women? Lesbianism?”
    “Maybe the first time . . . but we’ve talked about it and I’d like you to meet her. We’re discussing the possibility of the three of us . . . if you and she can be friends.”
    The three of them? He sat up. “You told her who I am?”
    “Not exactly. Just that you were a professor. I had to do that much. She wanted to know your bona fides. She wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with a street person, or a musician or something.”
    “You told her.” He was enraged.
    “Yes.”
    “Goddamnit, I told you I can’t be brought into this. I teach at a Catholic school. My whole career, my whole livelihood . . .”
    She put a finger out to his lips to shut him up, and said, “She’s very discreet. She understands all of that. She’s married, and her husband has no idea.”
    “You fuckin’ moron. You