Naked Came the Stranger - By Penelope Ashe Page 0,79

touch him, to hold him there, to make him plead for her. But she did nothing. She retrieved her panties from the foot of the bed and stepped into them. She found her brassiere in the living room and put it back in place. She found an overcoat in the hall closet and put it on. Caradoc watched all this in mute wonder, in a seeming state of shock.

"Amazing!" was all he said.

"What is truly amazing," she said, "is your ego."

"Hey," he said, "you'll come back, won't you? You'll come back and visit me, won't you?"

"I'll think about it," she promised – that and no more – and then she was gone.

She thought about it and she came back. There had never been a rationalization, a justification, a way to explain her repeated visits to the isolated house by the water's edge. But time and time again she returned. Possibly because Caradoc became such an effective antidote for the sordid little affairs as they ended, perhaps because he was a bracing tonic for the new affairs that were about to begin. Most likely, however, because in a sense they both were scientists, experimenters seeking life's more elusive truths. Even their interests were similar – while he explored love, she explored marriage.

It ended only because it had to end. Caradoc drained her of time and emotion. With Caradoc she had found more than a mutuality of interests, more than sex, more than the conversation that never grew stale or repetitive. There came a time, as winter gave way to spring, that she thought, not without alarm, that it might even be love. If it was love, it would ruin everything – the show, possibly herself. If not love there was no reason to continue. And so, one day early in June, as Zoltan Caradoc was saying that this year, for some reason, he didn't feel like going out on one of his annual three-month hunting expeditions, Gillian calmly did what had to be done. She ended it.

After that there was just one bit of communication. One last letter to become a treasure beyond price for literary historians tracing the career of Zoltan Caradoc. The envelope carried a postmark from Haiti.

Dear Gilly,

You have left your mark on King's Neck. The mark of the cat. The claw-shaped scar splayed across a neighborhood of broken lives. And I, almost as well as you, know the toll (God knows you boasted about it to me often enough). The dead, the destroyed, the psychotic, the forever sad. The marriages that you snapped in two as if you were breaking straws.

And finally, me – in a sense the beginning and the end. The mirror you saw your victories within, now shattered. I hope you have your seven years' bad luck; it is the least I can wish you. This is my last message, my curtain call for the part you made me play. After all the writing, all the words I was creating for you, I end our communication with a properly prosaic letter. But do not wrinkle that aristocratic nose. I dare not bore you, even now.

This letter will be like English beer, short and bitter. It must be brief because I have two ladies waiting for me in the next room. One is a pretty little blonde virgin of sixteen with a maddening resemblance to the White Rock girl. The other is a wildcat black who is a virgin only in her left ear. Sharing a bed with the two of them and exploring their reactions to the same events shall be my modest entertainment this cool summer evening. It is a curiously refreshing diversion. I call it sin and tonic.

But hold. This letter is serious. I am writing to humble myself before you, to acknowledge in cold blood what I have only recently come to realize: That in the end it was I who was your greatest triumph – your masterpiece of creative destruction. Your master piece.

(One day I shall be crucified on a cross of puns.) And did you know it all along? Did you, my sweet, cynical destroyer?

We had our moments. We did, dear Gilly, didn't we, in those days? At least admit that. The priestess and the poet. I knew your game. I knew all the tables were rigged for the house. But I saw no reason not to play. After all, unlike your other conquests, I had nothing to lose. There was nothing you could take from me, nothing you