Anything for You--A Novel Read online

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  For the peerless JGs:

  Jonny Geller and Jane Gelfman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to: Louise Maker, Mark Duncan, Marina Hardiman, Annalisa Ferrarotto, Stephen Coates, Nicola Stewart, Jonathan Field, Vicky Hutchinson, Peter Sollett, Eva Vives, Mike Loteryman, Anna Baker-Jones, Alice Naylor, Susanna Moore, Charles Spicer, and Deborah Schneider.

  PART

  ONE

  1

  July 31, 2017

  He’d never been enslaved by a woman before, but he was sure as shit enslaved by this one. Ever since he’d met her two months ago he’d been moving through his days in a state of erotic shock, appalled at the hold she had over him and powerless to do anything about it. Some mornings he looked in the mirror and just shook his head, baffled. He was, he had to admit, worried about himself. He’d had his share of females—dumb, dirty, damaged, depressing, demanding, desperate, occasionally even madly devoted—but he’d never, in the whole gaudy carnival of his unpredictable life, had a Class-A velvet-blond clairvoyant super-bitch like Sophia. The woman was soft as mink and smart as the Devil. The woman read his mind. And he didn’t even know her last name.

  “So how come?” he said to her.

  “How come what?”

  “How come I get the chauffeur treatment?”

  It was just after sundown and they were heading north out of the city in her car, a top-of-the-line Volvo that smelled as if it had just rolled off the production line. Sophia was wearing a gray cashmere dress and tan suede knee boots he knew (with a little detonation of rage in his teeth and armpits) would’ve retailed at about five times his monthly salary. All her gear looked kosher. She dressed like the sort of hooker with rates so high you’d never know she was a hooker. Sort who could live like a queen on three tricks a year, jetted out to bored Russian billionaires or kinky Saudi royals.

  “I told you,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”

  “A dirty surprise?”

  She didn’t answer. Just smiled and kept her eyes on the road. He took it as confirmation, but to remove any doubt he said: “I ain’t forgotten what you said last time.”

  Sophia kept looking straight ahead. Her eyes had a cold glittery power he knew could spook him if she decided to turn them on him and really look.

  “You hear me?” he said.

  “Yes, I hear you. I haven’t forgotten, either.”

  “And?”

  “And I keep my promises.”

  His cock stirred. The last time they’d been together, in yet another hotel (she always chose the meeting places, it was one of her many Rules) she’d said to him: I know what you want. At the time he’d been fucking her, slowly and with relished contempt, in the ass. She’d been on her elbows and knees, back arched, blond hair spread on the pillow in a soft explosion.

  You know what I want?

  Of course I do.

  Prove it.

  Not this time.

  Yeah, this time.

  No, not this time. I told you. You’ve got to earn it.

  You’re pretty sure of yourself, princess.

  At which point she’d turned and looked over her shoulder at him and said:

  I know I’m worth it. And so do you.

  That, he thought now, as she eased the Volvo out past an eighteen-wheeler lit up like a Christmas tree, was the problem. She was worth it. It wasn’t that she did everything. Plenty of crazy women did everything. It was the way she did everything, with that calm look of knowing every filthy secret you had stashed in your miserable soul. In the sack Sophia looked at him like a scientist getting exactly the results she expected. It was the look that made him come, every time.

  He moved his hand to her knee, slid it under her dress and up the long muscle of her thigh until he could feel the tender heat of her cunt. Her perfume smelled of vanilla.

  “Not yet, please,” she said. “I need to concentrate.”

  The new strap on his grandpa’s wristwatch itched. When they’d given it back to him the old strap had been all but rotted away. He’d felt weird buying the new one. Handing over money. Getting a product. A legitimate, harmless action. This was the other world.

  “I need to concentrate,” she repeated.

  He squeezed her thigh anyway. Then, with the strange obedience her witchcraft demanded, removed it, settled back in his seat, scratched his wrist under the new strap, and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  “Holy shit,” he said. “This place yours?”

  “No. It belongs to a friend. She lets me use it when she’s away.”

  They’d left I-5 half an hour ago. Since then back roads, scrub, woodland, signs to places he’d never heard of. Now they’d pulled up at the white-graveled front of a country house in a clearing surrounded by evergreens. Not a huge place, but solid and well kept. The kind of civilized home he’d never set foot inside. The kind that made a mockery of his life of other people’s couches and roachy one-room shit-holes—not to mention the years in his stinking cell. It gave him a sly thrill to think of fucking her in this house, surrounded by snug furnishings and top-dollar appliances. I ain’t forgotten what you said last time. Damn right he hadn’t. He was going to make a total pig of himself, whether she liked it or not. In fact he’d make sure she didn’t like it. That was what he wanted. Witchcraft or not, he’d bet she didn’t know that.

  They got out of the car. The summer night was quiet around them. He looked up. Black sky crammed with stars. He thought of drifting alone out there, toward some final freezing edge where even the stars ran out. Shut the thought down.

  “Help me with this stuff,” Sophia said, popping the Volvo’s trunk.

  She reached in and pulled out a small cooler bag, slung it over her shoulder. “Grab that,” she said, indicating a rolled-up tarp and blanket.

  “What?”

  “The bedding.”

  “We’re not going inside? You’re crazy.”

  “Indulge me. I like it outdoors.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “We’ll go inside afterward,” she said. She kissed him, pushed her tongue into his mouth. Then pulled back and looked at him. “You want to get what you want, don’t you?”

  “Your rules, huh?”

  “My rules. Come on.”

  He reached in and picked up the bedding roll. My rules. It had been that way from the start. When she’d taken his cell phone number she’d said: I’ll call you on this when I’m available. You won’t be able to call me. Your number will be blocked from my phone. That’s how this is going to work. After their first time together, when all she’d put out was a hand job (just a hand job, for Christ’s sake—and he was hooked!) she’d made him get an HIV test. He’d laughed when she’d told him. Are you fucking kidding? No, I’m not fucking kidding. Thanks to the force of her witchcraft he’d gone and got the test. Incredibly, it was negative. After that the sexual sky was the limit wi
th her, every spin a porno jackpot. Her only prohibition (she was very specific about it) was that he mustn’t pull her hair. He figured a fat-cat husband, ivory tower, bored trophy wife looking for a little action on the dark side. Well, he could give her plenty of that. Enough so she’d wish she’d never been born.

  He followed her across the lawn and down a narrow footpath that wound between the trees. The air smelled of dry ground and pine needles. It was a long time since he’d been anywhere like this. You forgot about it, nature, the earth, that darkness like something you could bathe in. It had a strange effect on him, as if his childhood had rushed up after all these years. He didn’t like it.

  “Can’t see a goddamned thing,” he said.

  “It’s okay. We’re here.”

  He felt the air thin ahead of him. The trees gave onto an open space. Ten paces brought him up alongside her, looking out over a small lake, maybe fifty meters wide and not much longer. The woods on the far bank were a wall of blackness. His skin shrank at the thought of the dark water.

  “I ain’t going swimming,” he said. “Rules or no rules.”

  “Relax,” Sophia said. “We’re not here for swimming. Would you lay that down for us?”

  He dropped the bedding and rolled it out with his foot. She set the cooler bag down and unzipped it. Then she turned to him, kissed him again, touched his cock through his jeans. In spite of his determination to go slow, his hands went under her dress and grabbed her ass.

  “Wait,” she said. “Lie down.”

  He had the clear thought that he was going to kill her. It was the thought he always had with women. Their cunts were supposed to tighten when you choked them. Some hilarious reflex. Designed by God. God had a dirty mind.

  “Please, lie down,” Sophia said. Then she leaned close again and whispered in his ear: “Slow. You want this to last, don’t you?”

  He moved back from her and lay down on the blanket, propped up on his elbows. He took off his wristwatch and set it by the edge of the tarp. The strap had given him a slight rash.

  Sophia slipped her arms from their sleeves and pulled the dress off over her head. No bra. Her bare flesh pale in the darkness. She stood over him.

  “Unzip my boots,” she said, smiling.

  Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ … His hands trembled. Each boot came off with a soft suck. It made him think of her life of quality clothes and restaurants and bubble baths and twinkling lights and money. Her toenails were perfectly manicured, painted the same deep red as her fingernails. He didn’t know how he was stopping himself from grabbing her and fucking her and choking her to death right there and then. Every second it seemed a certainty he would do just that. But he didn’t. He waited.

  Sophia stepped away again. She turned her back to him and slid her panties down, sticking her ass out a little to get them over her hips. Slender ankles. His flesh was dense and sensitive, his throat dry. She bent and reached into the cooler.

  “Do you want champagne or beer?” she said. “You should have champagne, because I won’t drink the whole bottle myself.”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “We can drink whatever you want. Just get over here.”

  It was when she straightened up and turned and he saw she was holding neither champagne nor beer that he realized he’d been wrong about her.

  He’d been wrong about Sophia in a way he’d never been wrong about anyone in his life.

  2

  She’d watched it happen as if from outside her body. But the second it was over she’d been yanked back into herself with a force like a roller-coaster drop.

  Now the gun was a hot weight in her hand. Her wrist thrummed from the silencered kick. It had felt like being stomped on by a hoof. She let the weapon fall to the ground. Her legs were heavy. She staggered to the water’s edge, dropped to her hands and knees, and vomited.

  For a few moments she stayed there, spitting out bile, eyes stinging. She had an image of herself, a naked goosefleshed woman groveling in the darkness. Primitive, an animal. The water lapped the shingle’s edge. She was grateful for it. Nature didn’t judge. The black lake, the pebbles, the trees, they shared a sentience that observed but didn’t care. Nature was amoral, self-involved, indifferent to the whole human show. It was there before us and would be there when we were gone. That thought, too, comforted her.

  No time. Get up. It’s not over. Get up. Now.

  But she couldn’t, in fact, get up. She crawled further into the water until it covered her knees, calves, feet, arms up to the elbows. She bathed her hands and face, teeth chattering. Her remote Catholicism offered itself. Water to wash away Original Sin. She’d made her First Confession at St. Theresa’s when she was eight years old. In the weeks leading up to it everyone in class had been fascinated by the idea that even if you confessed to murdering someone, the priest couldn’t report you to the police. Father Arbuthnot had grown weary of being quizzed about it. How many of you are planning on murdering someone? he’d asked, exasperated. One of her classmates, a highly strung girl named Veronica Miller, wouldn’t let it go. She was obsessed with the idea that God could forgive a murderer. Father Arbuthnot had spelled it out: There is nothing—literally nothing—God cannot find room in His heart to forgive, because God’s love is infinite. (“Infinite” was a tricky word, but it conjured a notion of God’s heart like a dark, star-filled warehouse that went on forever.) But, Father Arbuthnot continued, with a raised index finger, God’s forgiveness is only for those who are truly sorry for what they have done. And you prove that by accepting your penance. (“Penance,” they all knew, was something like five Hail Marys or ten Our Fathers.) So if one of you murdered someone and confessed it to me, I would tell you what any priest would tell you: that your penance would be to hand yourself in to the police. Do you understand? God would forgive you if you were truly sorry, but you could only prove that you were truly sorry by turning yourself in and owning up to what you had done. All right? Are you satisfied now? Can we stop, please, all this wretched talk about murder?

  She got, by degrees, to her feet. The cold water had refreshed her. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to do any of the things she had to do.

  So she made herself do them.

  The first two shots had struck him in the stomach and chest. After firing twice she’d walked over (surreally aware of the grass tickling her bare toes) and put a third shot in his head. It had hit him just above his left eyebrow.

  Glistening blood pooled under his skull. His white T-shirt was dark and wet around the other wounds. She thought of all the movies in which someone got shot. All the gallons of Hollywood blood. Fake.

  Real.

  The big stones and garbage bags were where she’d left them, a yard or two behind the tree line, along with the oxygen bleach. The rope was coiled on the spare wheel in the cavity under the floor of the Volvo’s trunk. Four rolls of waterproof duct tape beneath the driver’s seat, folded scrubs under the passenger. You do it right next to the lake so there’s less ground to cross. You drag him. Can you drag that weight? And if the stones work loose? The body fills with its own gasses. Floats up. Hi, everyone! Look at me—a corpse! The lake’s forty feet deep. How long before ropes rot in water? She’d looked nothing up online. No such thing as an erased search history. Even idiots knew that. Check for blood under the tarp if the bullets have gone through. Dig out the bullets if they have. Remove the turf. Shell casings. Shoes.

  She went over to the cooler bag. The air had already half dried her skin. She had a profane sensitivity to her nakedness: nipples, belly, thighs, ankles. It was as if the summer night caressed her, like a cat, with its mind on something else.

  Ice. Freezer bags. Hacksaw. Sabatier meat knife.

  Meat.

  Knife.

  The words floated free of their objects.

  A bat whirred past her head, startling her.

  It occurred to her that she hadn’t thought to check no one else was here.

 
; Well, it was too late now. It was too late for anything except going on.

  She took the roll of freezer bags, the knife, and the hacksaw and knelt down beside his body.

  * * *

  By the time she was finished she knew the lake was a bad idea. She also knew (remembered hearing, or reading, or seeing on TV) that there was nothing more likely to get a criminal caught than changing his plan in the middle of the crime.

  Changing her plan, rather. Her crime.

  She sat back on her heels, took a deep breath—and considered her options.

  3

  August 5, 2017

  When the intruder triggered the motion-sensitive security lights in his son and daughter-in-law’s backyard just after 2:00 A.M., seventy-four-year-old insomniac Vincent Lyle was doing what he was always doing at that unforgiving hour; namely, sitting in the conservatory trying and failing to read Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections. It wasn’t this author in particular who defeated him. It was the entire project of Reading Books Allegedly Worth Reading.

  For a moment, Vincent and the intruder looked at each other. Vincent was in his favored spot: the pink velour wingbacked chair next to the potted asparagus fern that poured down from its stand to the parquet with a delicate joie de vivre. The intruder, in black gear and ski mask with white-rimmed eyeholes, was picking himself up from the turf, where, apparently, he had tripped over the lawn roller in the dark. The white-rimmed eyeholes made Vincent think—in spite of the adrenaline—of a raccoon.

  * * *

  Vincent had been a Reader all his life, as a child, a student, a teacher, a professor, a dean of faculty. Reading had, in fact, been no less his life than his real life. Ulysses, he used to say with only slight exaggeration, had affected him easily as much as had falling in love for the first time. (Which he had done at eighteen, with Millie Doyle, a gymnastic Irish girl with corkscrewy blond hair and an appetite for books even more voracious than his own. She had broken his heart. They had both known she would, sooner or later.) Other loves and other books had followed, of course. For Vincent they were the twin sources that deepened the human mysteries and his own vital immersion in them. Eventually he had met Elsa Wheaton, a Classics professor who joined Stanford two years after him. They had both, in their late thirties, sufficient luck, imagination, and character to fall in love in the way that lasted, with a rare mix of sexual passion and the subtlety of appetite that kept it alive despite monogamy and the domestic grind. By forty-five they were both tenured, had two children (Helen and Lucas) enough money in the bank, a pleasant (book-filled, naturally) house on Peter Coutts Circle, and the grace to acknowledge at least from time to time that they were in the tiny minority of human beings who had actually ended up with the life they’d always wanted.