sympathize with her most deeply. Of course he would. Who wouldn't? She could see herself sitting there on the witness stand and saying, "So there I was, handcuffed to the bedpost and wearing nothing but some underwear from Victoria's Secret and a smile, but I changed my mind at the last minute, and Gerald knew it, and that makes it rape."
Yes sit, that would do her, all right. Bet your boots.
She came out of this appalling fantasy to find Gerald yanking at her panties. He was kneeling between her legs, his face so studious that you might have been tempted to believe it was the Bar Exam he was planning to take instead of his unwilling wife. There was a runner of white spittle coursing down his chin from the center of his plump lower lip.
Let him do it, Jessie. Let him shoot his squirt. It's that stuff in hisballs that's making him crazy, and you know it. It makes them all crazy. When he gets rid of it, you'll be able to talk to him again. You'llbe able to deal with him. So don't make a fuss-just lie there and waituntil he's got it out of his system.
Good advice, and she supposed she would have followed it if not for the new presence inside her. This unnamed newcomer clearly thought that Jessie's usual source of advice-the voice she had over the years come to think of as Goodwife Burlingame was a wimp of the highest order. Jessie still might have let things run their course, but two things happened simultaneously. The first was her realization that, although her wrists were cuffed to the bedposts, her feet and legs were free. At the same moment she realized this, the runner of drool fell off Gerald's chin. It dangled for a moment, elongating, and then fell on her midriff, just above the navel. Something about this sensation was familiar, and she was swept by a horribly intense sensation of deja vu. The room seemed to darken around her, as if the windows and the skylight had been replaced with panes of smoked glass.
It's his spunk, she thought, although she knew perfectly well it wasn't. It's his goddam spunk.
Her response was not so much directed at Gerald as at that hateful feeling that came flooding up from the bottom of her mind. In a very real sense she acted with no thought at all, but only lashed out with the instinctive, panicky revulsion of a woman who realizes the trapped thing fluttering in her hair is a bat.
She drew back her legs, her rising right knee barely missing the promontory of his chin, and then drove her bare feet out again like pistons. The sole and instep of her right drove deep into the bowl of his belly. The heel of her left smashed into the stiff root of his penis and the testicles hanging below it like pate, ripe fruit.
He rocked backward, his butt coming down on his plump, hairless calves. He tilted his head up toward the skylight and the white ceiling with its reflected patterns of sunripples and voiced a high, wheezy scream. The loon on the lake cried out again just then, in hellish counterpoint; to Jessie it sounded like one mate commiserating with another.
Gerald's eyes weren't slitted now; they weren't gleaming, either. They were wide open, they were as blue as today's flawless sky (the thought of seeing that sky over the autumn-empty lake had been the deciding factor when Gerald had called from the office and said he'd had a postponement and would she like to go up to the summer place at least for the day and maybe overnight), and the expression in them was an agonized glare she could hardly look at. Cords of tendon stood out on the sides of his neck. Jessie thought: I haven't seen those since the rainy summer when he pretty muchgave up gardening and made J. W. Dant his hobby instead.
His scream began to fade. It was as if someone with a special Remote Gerald Control were turning down his volume. That wasn't it, of course; he had been screaming for an extraordinarily long time, perhaps as long as thirty seconds, and he was just running out of breath. I must have hurt him badly, she thought. The red spots on his cheeks and the swath across his forehead were now turning purple.
You did! the Goodwife's dismayed voice cried. You really reallydid!