Hole: A Ghost Story Page 3

  A year and a half? Impossible!

  BigHardHank7 replied:

  You need to stop teasing me. I won’t be able to sleep. Send me a pic of your pussy so I can jack off after my wife falls asleep. Maybe then I’ll be able to stop thinking about you and get some shuteye. I wish I could sneak out and see you tonight, but I can only run to town for a burger so many times before Mary starts to wonder why I’m not getting fat! LOL! I swear that woman can read minds sometimes.

  Fantasies, entreaties. Mary felt her blood run cold. She read through it all, growing more and more disgusted, and then she closed all the folders, re-hid them and logged off his computer.

  She drifted around the house in a daze, stunned by the revelations. It wasn’t so much the discovery of his infidelity that shook her, but the depth of his disdain for her. Bitch, cold fish, Sybil-- he’d called her all those things. He’d told Penny about her childhood molestation, something Mary had shared with no one but Hank. Told his mistress he believed her abuse at the hands of her older brother was the root of her frigidity, why she couldn’t engage him sexually on anything more than a superficial level, why he was so unsatisfied with their love life.

  It was a betrayal. She had trusted him with that secret. It was something she’d never told anyone else. Not her pastor. Certainly not her mother or father.

  Mother knew only about the Bad Thing Dean could do. She knew nothing about the Bad Things he had done to her.

  And I’m not frigid! Mary objected in her head. I enjoy sex! She did all the dirty things for Hank that men liked, with very few exceptions. She was no prude.

  But in Hank’s opinion, she was. One e-mail read: She just lays there. Doesn’t do anything. It’s like having sex with a blowup doll, not that I ever have. LOL! Sometimes I wish she would do something TO me. I swear, It’s like masturbating, only I use her hole instead of my hand.

  That’s not true at all! She thought. And if he really felt that way, why didn’t he come to me with it? Why did he have to confide in another woman?

  Then she cried.

  When her tears had dried on her cheeks, she went upstairs and packed her bags. She had decided to go to her parents’ house. She couldn’t stay here, not with all this pain and anger humming inside her skull like charged particles inside a cyclotron. It wouldn’t be safe for Hank. She was afraid something would happen to him, that she would do something to hurt him like the time she hurt Stevie—

  No! You mustn’t think about that! It wasn’t real!

  But the memory came anyway. Her little brother teasing her. Mary in the floor, playing with her dollies. Stevie was bouncing up and down on her mattress, taunting her with some stupid made-up song. How did it go? Mary-Mary’s butt is hairy… something like that. It wasn’t really all that cruel, only he wouldn’t stop singing it. She’d glared at him angrily, yelling at him to shut up, and her angry had lanced out of her like an invisible spear.

  Stevie was flung from her bed in mid-jump, thrown so hard he collided with the wall. The impact had knocked him out and there was a bruise on his stomach later like an invisible fist had struck him. Mother had spanked her so hard! Mother had lost it a little, whipped her until she was bruised like Steve, only on the butt and the back of her thighs.

  Mary pushed the memory away, trembling, her stomach tying itself in knots.

  It was hard, she found, to pack with a broken heart. The pain was outrageous. It felt like someone had punched her in the sternum. She hadn’t expected real physical pain, but she found there was truth to the cliche. She stood hunched over, the muscles in her shoulders rigid, as she stacked undergarments in the expensive leather bags they’d bought for their Florida vacation.

  She couldn’t imagine confronting Hank about the affair. Not yet. Her pain was too raw, her anger too black. Hank was an even-tempered man, very rational and thoughtful, so she’d never gotten much practice at fighting with him.

  To be honest, she wasn’t sure exactly how she felt. There were just too many questions. She only knew she needed some time to herself, some time alone so her brain could process all this new information, hopefully come to some sane conclusion. Maybe then they could talk, salvage something, perhaps, of a marriage that had foundered on the rocks.

  Before she left, she called her husband’s office.

  Hank was a lawyer with a small practice in the neighboring town of Dailyville. He and his best friend from college had started the business after Travis visited and fell in love with Hank’s hometown. Despite the odds, they’d made it a modest success. Neither of them were ever going to get rich, but they weren’t exactly living in a trailer park either.

  At least he’s not having an affair with his secretary, she thought, listening to the phone ring. Hank’s secretary was a gay man named Brandon Tran.

  She didn’t know who this Penny was, only that she was employed by one of the businesses on the same street her husband’s law office resided. Mary had gleaned that much information, at least, from the surfeit of emails.

  Oh, and she also knew what the slut’s vagina looked like. She’d found several digital photos in her husband’s computer along with the emails. Slender fingers with long manicured fingernails spreading the lips of her vulva. No photos of her face, however. Classy lady, this Penny.

  “Stanford and Nealy, this Brandon, how may I help you?”

  Normally, Brandon’s thick Vietnamese accent made her smile, but not that day. Not even a twitch.

  “Hi, Brandon, this is Mary.”

  “Oh, hi, Mary! How you today?” Brandon inquired.

  “Not so good…”

  She asked him to give her husband a message-- No, she didn’t want to talk to him! She was in a hurry. Just let him know her mother was sick, and she was going to stay with her parents for a few days and take care of her.

  Hank would understand. Mary’s father, a retired drill sergeant, was in bad health and wouldn’t be able to look after his wife. Jim Klegg suffered from COPD and emphysema. A lifetime of smoking Camel unfiltered cigarettes had braised his lungs to a glossy black luster.

  “Oh, I hate hear that. I let Hank know. You want him call you later?” Brandon asked.

  “No. I’ll call him tonight when he gets home from work. I really need to get on the road.”

  “Well, okay… I hope your mother feels better soon.”

  “Me, too, Brandon.”

  As Mary pressed the blade to the skin of her forearm now, she wondered what Hank was doing that very moment. It was lunchtime. He used to come home for lunch two or three times a week, but not so much in the last year or so. He always had a good excuse. He was backed up on his casework, eating lunch at his desk while he read briefs or looked over contracts, or had to meet with a client.

  Why hadn’t she realized what he was really up to?

  The only explanation she could come up with was that a part of her simply didn’t want to know.

  What was the old saying? Ignorance is bliss.

  Death, too, would be a kind of ignorance, wouldn’t it? An absence of knowledge. An end to all the memories and hurt.

  Eternal bliss.

  Mary got ready to cut.

  4.

  It was almost funny, in an irritating, I-can’t-believe-this-shit kind of way. The only thing Hank could do to get it up when he got to his mistress’s house for some lunchtime hanky-panky was visualize his wife naked.

  Maybe he felt pressed for time.

  They’d taken their lunch breaks together, Hank from his law office, Penny from the Dutch bakery up the street, and they’d driven over to her bungalow on the other side of town to fool around.

  Penny had a quaint one-bedroom cottage on Big Bay Road, out in the countryside near the interstate. She was renting it from a local yokel named Tom Fender. It was well maintained for a rental property owned by a famous drunk. Hank couldn’t remember a time he’d talked to the man that Tom didn’t smell of whiskey and sour old man sweat, but the place had hand-crafted shutters with hearts cut out o
f them, a white picket fence, and wind chimes hanging from the branches of the big maples shading the yard. It was a dollhouse for grown women.

  By the time they met up, then drove to her place, then got out of their cars and trotted inside, and then traded some spit and started to undress, there was only thirty minutes left to do it-- and that didn’t include the time it would take to shower, dress, and get back to work. Hank had a hearing at 1:00 PM sharp, and Penny had to be back at the bakery.

  That was just an excuse though, wasn’t it? Today was no different from any other day they’d hooked up.

  They’d been doing this, rushing to her place to fool around on their lunch breaks, two or three times a week since they first started sleeping together a year or so ago. Only now the thrill was gone. The novelty had worn off, and Hank was beginning to feel guilty about the whole sordid business. Guilty and… well, to be honest, a little bit annoyed. All the frantic running around used to be exciting, but now it just gave him a sour stomach.

  It was Penny’s idea to sneak off and have a quick one today. Hank was planning to work through lunch. He had a ham sandwich and a Diet Coke sitting on his desk next to the mound of paperwork he needed to shovel through. In fact, he was just getting started when his phone chirped and his assistant’s voice crackled from the speaker:

  “Mr. Stanford? Cupcake on da line.”

  Brandon called Penny “Cupcake”, always with thinly veiled disapproval. Hank’s legal assistant was fond of Mary, but being well-paid-- and being a guy, queer or not-- Hank trusted him to keep his dirty secret, so Penny was free to call him openly at the office. Brandon might let Hank slip up and get himself caught someday, but he wouldn’t blab.

  Hank had answered the phone with an impatient sigh. “Hello?”

  He never greeted her by name over the phone. He didn’t quite trust Brandon not to “accidentally” confuse Mary with Penny on the line. He’d have a lot of explaining to do if he greeted his wife with a big cheery, “Hey, Penny!”

  It was Penny, though.

  “Whatcha doing for lunch, big man?” she asked in a breathy voice.

  “Catching up on some work.”

  “You know they have a saying about that, right?”

  “What’s that? And who, exactly, are ‘they’?”

  “All work and no play makes Hank a dull boy. That’s what they say.”

  Pushing his papers around his desk, Hank asked, “Is that right?”

  “Mmm-hmm. I was wondering if you wanted to run over to my place for lunch today. I have a leak that needs fixin’.”

  Annoyed as he was, he couldn’t help laughing, and he couldn’t ignore the physical response his body had to her sexy phone voice. So he’d pushed aside his work and meager lunch and joined her for a noontime rendezvous.

  He realized there was a problem after he stripped down to his boxer shorts and discovered Sofronio hadn’t stirred at all. His little buddy was hanging morosely between his hairy thighs. Hank scowled, even more annoyed now. Sofronio was normally a dependable little fellow. So much so that Hank had given his penis a nickname. Cheesy? Maybe, but he’d never had a problem performing. Ever.

  Well, not until today.

  The real problem was: Penny had begun to pressure him lately. Dropping little remarks about him divorcing his wife. She was beginning to talk as if they had a future together, as if their fling had evolved into something long term. Hank had been very honest about what he wanted from their relationship (something casual, and mutually satisfying).

  She always played the comments off as jokes, with a little titter and a wave of her fingers, but she didn’t fool Hank. He could see how much she wanted him all to herself, how jealous she was of his wife and the life he’d given Mary. He was waiting now for the ultimatums to commence, and prayed she didn’t do something foolish if things between them soured.

  For a married man with a comfortable life and a good law practice, it was a lot of pressure.

  Hank had always thrived under pressure, but Sofronio didn’t.

  Penny was sliding her panties down her tan thighs, but she noticed the expression on his face and paused to ask, “What is it, baby?”

  She was a good-looking woman, an inch taller than him, but that never bothered Hank like it seemed to bother some men. He thought it was sexy. Blonde hair. Long limbs. Skin like butter. She wasn’t a knockout. She had a bit of an Olive Oyle thing going, but she was young and she was sexually aggressive, and it was her forwardness more than anything that was responsible for Hank’s slip. He would never have pursued her romantically without a lot of encouragement on her part, even though his marriage had been a bit rocky lately. She was actually the first to suggest he could do more than flirt with her across the bakery counter. That she wouldn’t mind if he did all sorts of bad things to her… if he wanted.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just stressed out.”

  He watched her unsnap the hooks of her bra, watched her breasts tumble free. Penny’s breasts were average in size and going a little floppy-- not too bad for a woman her age, but nothing to write home about either.

  Just the sight of her breasts got his engine revving six months ago, but now, nothing. Hank felt a hot flush of panic.

  He stood there, thumbs hooked in the waistband of his boxers, thinking how he suddenly didn’t want to push them down, not in front of this woman. Mary might be naïve, but Penny certainly wasn’t. There’d be no excuses to fool her.

  Come on! Hank thought. Chin up, little guy! One more time for Daddy!

  Not even a wiggle down there.

  Maybe it was all the damn unicorns. Penny’s bedroom was a shrine to the mythic beast. There were unicorns on the headboard, unicorns on the bedside tables, stuffed unicorns on the bed itself, cradled between the pillows, and even a unicorn picture on the wall: one of those cheap airbrush prints you won at the carnival for knocking down milk jugs or picking the right plastic duck out of the water trough. Hank had never seen so many unicorns in one place, and it honestly made him a little leery of his mistress’s emotional development. Hank’s sister had packed all her unicorn décor when she was fifteen. Put them in a box and carried them up to the attic.

  But not Penny.

  Penny slid beneath the covers and smiled up at him. “Climb in, big boy. I got something under here that’ll help you relax!”

  That brought a wince to his face. That “something” under the covers was the root of his anxiety.

  He reluctantly swept his boxer shorts down and shimmied under the covers before she could see just how stressed out he really was. Penny pressed herself against him under the sheets, rubbing her leg up and down his thigh, stroking his chest and cooing, but everything she did just seemed to annoy him today. The rasp of the stubble on her legs, the chill of the covers, the ticking of her unicorn alarm clock. He tasted acid at the back of his throat, and the muscles in his neck started throbbing.

  This is ridiculous! Hank thought. Are you a man, or are you a mouse?

  He remembered the bright thrill of his early infatuation with her. This was back when she first started working at the bakery up the street. Hank and his partner went there every morning for coffee, sometimes a pastry too, and then one morning here was this fresh new waitress, leaning over the counter and eyeing him like it was her birthday and he was the biggest present sitting on the table. Hair tumbling down in gold ringlets. Bright blue eyes and the cutest little sharp-tipped nose. White teeth. Pink Barbie lipstick. He took one look at her and felt butterflies start doing loop-de-loops inside his stomach, and then when their eyes met—that flash of mutual attraction. Maybe it was cliché, but it was like a little zap of electricity. The “spark”!

  He found himself fantasizing about her at work later that afternoon. He imagined running his palms over her shoulders, her breasts, her smooth bare back and buttocks. He wondered what she looked like naked. Was she tan all over? Did she have tattoos? He was so distracted, Brandon asked if there was something wrong.

  Nop
e, nothing wrong here!

  They flirted for weeks before anything really happened, sharing double entendres over the wedding cake catalogs, until Hank’s partner Travis, standing right next to them with a bear claw in his hand, finally exploded in disgust, “Good grief! Why don’t you two get a room?” and Penny had said, “How about I just take him to my place instead!”

  With a little titter, of course.

  Just in case he wasn’t serious.

  The attraction was still there. She was a fit, cheerful woman, but all he could think about now was whether or not she would lose it when he broke it off with her. Would she accept the break up gracefully, no hard feelings, or would she go all Glenn Close on him? Confront his wife with their affair?

  At least he didn’t have any pet rabbits.

  Hank took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Penny, we need to talk… he rehearsed inside his head. He couldn’t break it off now, of course. He was lying naked right beside her. He shut his eyes and pretended it was Mary he was lying in bed with. His wife’s smooth flesh gliding against his. His wife’s lips making their way down his chest and stomach, all the way down there, to do a certain little something Mary usually didn’t care to do.

  He recalled the simple, uncomplicated lovemaking he shared with his wife. It was no rocket ride, not after twenty years, but at least with Mary it was comfortable, no anxiety, no sneaking around. He knew what she liked. She knew what he liked. He tried not to dwell too much on how lame it was to fantasize about his wife while lying in his mistress’s bed or worry when his house of cards was going to topple.

  How do I get my life back? he wondered.

  Hank sighed. He delved into his treasure chest of fantasies, digging for a recollection that might spark his lust today.

  Mary’s face swam up in his imagination. Those big grave eyes…! She claimed she was only German and Welsh, but her eyes were almond-shaped and exotic, so dark they were almost black. She was a Goth chick before there was such a thing as Goth chicks. A real life Morticia, to his Gomez. It was her eyes. Those eyes had captured his imagination long ago, and it was those eyes that lit the spark of his passion even now, after so many years of familiarity.