Programmed for Peril

trumpet, and a devastating wit. He requested volunteers for a skit. Two little boys were quick to fill parts. He needed a woman, too. When no one came forward he selected Trish. He gathered his impromptu troupe and gave them instructions.
    He was tall and sandy-haired. His quick smile exposed large, uneven teeth and hinted at an inspired sense of humor. When the performance ended he joined Trish, who was finishing her salad. “I can put you in show business,” he said. “I heard you sing. Can you dance? I can make you a star!”
    Telling herself she had to leave, she nonetheless stayed and chatted. His name was Ron Verner. He played his instruments wherever he could get booked, from studio sessions to gigs like today’s, working for parks and recreation departments. He was open and grinny. She liked him-Though he did most of the talking, when she rose to leave he said, “Why is such a sweet lady so sad?”
    Almost against her will she wrote his phone number on the back of a cash register receipt, explaining he couldn’t call her. She rushed off like Cinderella to her cruel stepmother. On the way back to Castle Carson she memorized Ron’s number and fluttered the receipt out the window because nothing escaped her master’s green-eyed gaze. Two weeks passed before he asked her to run another errand. She was delighted; she dared not try to arrange an absence herself. He was so shrewd that he’d fall upon any deviousness like hawk on rabbit.
    Her afternoon with Ron sped by in what seemed an instant. When they parted tears smeared her eyes. His gentleness and sympathy fell like a searchlight on the hostile landscape of what her life had become under Carson’s rule. She despaired because opportunities to meet her new friend could come only so rarely.
    As though to fulfill her hopes Carson committed himself to a lucrative project that required that he travel for a period. He devoted the day before departure to exercising his pleasure at the expense of her submission. By now she greeted these sessions with inner bewilderment. Despite superficial denials of the roles of pain and obedience in her arousal, she climbed to ever higher reaches of ecstasy under his mental and physical lashings. As for him, no mythological satyr could outdo his tireless penetrations of her orifices. When even he was sated he turned to what he called “tricks of the trade,” electromechanical devices of his own design. This day he had a new one. He held up one of a set of six silvery snails. “This, Queen of My Heart, is a whiz-bang...
    He was no sooner on his way to the airport than she rushed to Ron Verner’s side. He had a recording studio built onto the side of his small house. There amid speakers and equalizers she pulled him down onto a thinly padded cot, weeping as though from a beating, fingers sunk like claws into his shirt shoulders. “Love me, love me,” she cried. “Love me like a normal man!”
    She could not dare to have Ron come to stay with her in Castle Carson, nor could she be long away from there. Carson always called unpredictably. She had to have an excuse for her absences, as though he was still in residence. As to nights, she slept chaste as a nun, hands jammed against her groin. Still she met with Ron seven times during Carson’s absence. They made love fifteen times; Carson had led her to the habit of counting. So she would understand that “no one you will ever know could want you more than I.” Indeed, how could a mere mortal like Ron reach Carson’s astronomical number of performances? Resisting at first, she ultimately told Ron everything about herself and about the man it was all too easy to call “master.”
    Doodling on his electric keyboards, he pondered and composed “An Exercise for Three Personalities”. “Trish’s Theme” began as a tranquil melody that leapt into jangly arpeggios. “Carson” was a march with a bass line growling like a demented Wagner leitmotif. His own theme was a lighthearted folk tune. He combined the three, fingers flying over the keys like white sticks in a hurricane. Themes linked, intertwined, spread apart, then joined. He looked at her as he wrapped up the piece.
    Carson’s theme burst forth, triumphant.
    It told her that Ron had a clear understanding of the extent to which he was overmatched. “You’ll have to make a sudden, complete disappearance,” he said. “It’s your only hope with a man like that. I’m not a shrink, but it sounds like his head is