brow relaxed. Not that he was proving his own innocence—far from it—but he was telling the truth, and something about that very gesture of honesty, after so many years, seemed to calm him. By the time he was done, Ben was a different man.
Here is what he said.
I’ve often wondered, when or if I ever told his story, how I’d structure it, where I’d begin, whether I’d withhold certain details until the end to build suspense, or spill it all, as it were, from the beginning. This is the usual writer’ dilemma. I’m still not sure what I’ll do, only I know that before I elucidate what actually happened that Thanksgiving, I first have to tell you something about Anne.
She was a very strange woman, in some ways seductive, in others weirdly repellent. Even when I was a little boy back in Bradford—you may remember her mentioning this—she used to give me massages. I mean, here I was, nine years old or something, and every time my parents had a party she’d be sitting down next to me on the couch offering to give me a back rub. Nine years old! And when she gave me those back rubs, I have to say, there was something in her touch that was much more than motherly. That was frankly erotic. Not that she ever touched my dick or anything; she’d just, now and then, run her fingers very lightly over my arms, so lightly that the hairs stood on end; or she’d let her hand dip for a second down to the waistband of my underpants. I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. In fact, as I got older, I started to look forward to her coming over, because I hoped that when she did, she’d give me a massage. She didn’t always. It was really a question of her mood, or how drunk she was. Once I hit puberty I even started plotting how I might get her alone, because I was convinced that if we could just be alone together for a while, she’d go the whole nine yards and jerk me off. That was as far as I let my fantasy go. I never imagined her blowing me, or my fucking her. I had my first orgasm thinking of her giving me a massage, reaching under the waistband of my shorts and touching my prick. Just touching it, very lightly. That’ still such a potent scenario for me I’ve paid prostitutes to enact it. It’ funny, I’ve had a fairly rich sexual life, I’ve had lots of experiences with lots of different kinds of women—and yet even today, nothing excites me more than getting a massage from a woman who’ older than me. And now it’ almost comical, because as / get older, the woman has to get older, too, in order to make the thing work. Which means, what, that when I’m eighty, I’m going to have to find a woman who’ a hundred? And when you think that when all this started, Anne was younger than I am today . . .
Then we moved away from Bradford. I entered puberty. My voice changed.
In Wellspring, I started noticing girls at school. There was no question but that with their firm breasts and flat stomachs, they attracted me much more viscerally than Anne ever had. Still, she’d left her mark on me. For instance, after Mark went away, I was plundering in his closet one day when I found a copy of Hustler, which I started masturbating with. There were naked women with their legs spread, but there was also a sort of tableau vivant, a photo narrative, involving an older woman and a male prostitute. In the last photograph, the prostitute washes his genitals in the sink while the woman lies on the bed in fishnet stockings and garters, smoking a cigarette. I used to gaze at that photograph for hours. Hours. I studied it. I thought about Anne. The woman in the picture—her eyes had that same look as Anne’, a look of dissipation and the temporary abolition of a hunger, but not of any real satisfaction. And also recklessness, as if there were nothing she wouldn’t try once.
I still have the magazine, by the way. I can show it to you any time you like.
And then one day, rather out of the blue, my mother announced that Anne would be coming to visit us over Thanksgiving, with her new husband.
Well, as you can guess, the