Fiction: Lord Have Mercy On Me, A Sinner

By J.M.

 

What Beauford could not seem to explain was just how much sex he had. He couldn’t stop himself and nobody was stopping him. Everything was insertion, everything was sex. Finality, climax. Things of that nature. Sometimes it was sex with women over the phone, or sex with women he met over the phone. Coming and coming, coming then going. Sometimes it felt like a late train pulling into a station. Sometimes it felt like falling asleep. Sometimes it felt like the end of the world, and sometimes it felt like nothing at all.

With Nina, it was all of the above. When Beauford met her he’d first been smug, then demure, as demure as a man with calloused hands and a sex addiction could be. He’d found her at the market. He could do with a wife, everyone told him so. He wooed her with his sweet tongue and in two months they decided to marry. After he proposed, Nina let him kiss her for the first time and quietly confessed that she was waiting for marriage. When he exposed himself to her on their wedding night she said she’d never held a cock in her life. Her mouth couldn’t even wrap around the word. She handled his like a foreign object. He held her for a while, and then they fucked. Her body was soft and warm; she was tight and gentle and then wild. It drove him crazy. God almighty, he thought, she’s a pure virgin. He couldn’t get enough of her. For three weeks, Beauford almost thought he’d settled down.

And then it was back to his old ways again, his weekdays with escorts and weekends with the hookers. On his lunch breaks he paid for pornography at the adult theater, or he bought Playboy and parked his car behind a secluded building. While Nina slept, he called the phone sex operator: “Hello, handsome.” He tried to resist it, he really tried, but Beauford couldn’t help himself. Such was the nature of his disease. 

Then he’d gone and accidentally put a pornography charge on his company card. At dinner his secretary rang to inform him of the error. Nina picked up instead. Beauford saw her shrink as she talked quietly into the receiver, and when she hung up the phone, her face wore a misty-eyed expression he’d never seen before. He tried to search her eyes for some reaction but she was silent, queer and saintlike, and he realized the look on her face was one of mercy and understanding. She asked him why he’d done it. Beauford explained it to her as best he could, his insatiability, his compulsion. He told her more than she’d asked for; he lay himself bare, it was the right thing for a husband to do. It was a disease, he said, and it pained him. 

While he spoke, she sat quietly and stared, and eventually Nina said she understood. Beauford thought he felt his heart break. He promised himself he’d keep his secrets more carefully. He promised her that he’d stop for good.

So there was peace: Beauford began to attend anonymous addiction meetings. They began redecorating the house. They even hired a gardener to take care of the back yard, which was overgrown and half-occupied by ivies and thick underbrush.

But he could never keep a promise for too long. His meetings were quickly replaced by motel stays with any woman he could get his hands on. He took extra hours, called Nina to tell her he was alright, he’d be home for dinner a little later than usual; and then he fucked. Photos and movies weren’t enough to get him off anymore. These days, he took two hookers at a time. He had them roughly and angrily. They weren’t Nina. They had no use for his kindness. 

And though he took greater care than ever to conceal his illness, Nina must have had her way of knowing. She was a woman, Beauford sighed to himself, they always knew secret things. She played her ignorance well, anyways. 

But a change had come upon her. She took up smoking; she invested in trashy lingerie and red lipstick, the kind the less expensive whores wore, and when she kissed him, it was wet and desperate. It almost disgusted him, her eagerness, the crude way she began to press her ass against him in the kitchen or in bed. It cheapened her, Beauford thought to himself. Meanwhile it was as if he’d forgotten how to make Nina finish. He could get her started, but she had to use her hands to get off. Sometimes he offered his own but she pushed him away; his hands were rough, she said. She could do it herself. He didn’t enjoy watching her while he lay, wilted, next to her. He hated how she looked away from him when she came. She’d throw her eyes to the furthest corner of the room. Sometimes she closed them altogether. 

Slowly but surely, Beauford began to lose his appetite, and with it, his erection. The women on the phone could not raise him up like they used to. The downtown women stopped getting him off. One by one his pleasures ran dry; and then, after four failed attempts with four different whores, he stopped getting hard with Nina. 

The first time, she stared at his limp cock with blithe amusement and laughed at him in a hard, mean way that made his blood run cold. It happened again the next night, and the night after that. Beauford had never been the kind of man to apologize, but then there he sat on the linens, soft and sorry. It was agony, the way her eyes narrowed at him and his apologies. Maybe next time, she’d say, and then they redressed and went to sleep. Eventually they stopped touching each other, and then they stopped talking. It was a silent house. It gave Beauford too much time to think. At night he lay awake, terrified that his own impotence had polluted her, made her dry and desireless. 

And then he came home early and found her flushed and satisfied at the door, and that’s how Beauford learned his wife shared his affliction. He saw her eyes following the gardener’s truck. He saw her red face, her heaving chest, her rumpled clothes, like she’d come off some frenzy. She leaned against the wall and smiled to herself until she turned and saw Beauford in the doorway. Then her face fell, and he began to shout. He called her a bitch, a whore. She couldn’t help herself, could she? She’d spread her legs for anyone who came through the door. Yes, he’d raised his voice. He was ashamed to remember it. He even raised his hand, but he’d never hit a woman before. He only did it to scare her off, anyways. 

Nympomaniac, she was; no wonder she’d become so loose, so crass and mean. They didn’t call men that, though. Men were just sex addicts. Beauford was an addict, he suffered from addiction. But Nina was a nymphomaniac.

That evening, Beauford packed a suitcase and said he’d stay with a friend. He couldn’t live with her anymore, couldn’t have a nymphomaniac for a wife. Nina wept at the door and said she’d get rid of the gardener, it didn’t matter if he hadn’t finished clearing the yard. But it was too late; Beauford spat at her feet and sped away in his car. He had fire in his belly. It was the first time in weeks he’d felt alive. 

But his sleepless nights caught up to him on the expressway, and in his fatigue he spun off the road and crashed into the barriers. He broke a rib. It was all very dramatic. The ambulances even turned their sirens on as they took him to the hospital, like something out of a soap opera. Nina must have thought it was a suicide attempt; at his bedside, she apologized and begged him to return. Things could be the way they used to, she sobbed. All he had to do was control himself, control himself and come home. 

So he did. Beauford returned to their sexless bed and controlled himself. He controlled himself when he found that Nina had not done away with the gardener as she’d promised. He controlled himself when she pushed him off at night and pulled away in the morning. He controlled himself when, after he’d finally finished clearing the backyard, she invited the gardener to dinner.

“It’s the least we could do for you,” she said, with a warmth Beauford hadn’t heard for months. While they ate he couldn’t manage a word into their conversation; they were speaking in code, he thought, or maybe some foreign language. While he was still in the kitchen, Beauford heard Nina kiss the gardener before he left. He caught her eye that night before bed. She looked away and raised her chin, and he understood that the nature of their arrangement had changed. Nina had robbed him blind of his vitality, stolen it from him and used it for herself while he lay flaccid and alone.

In place of it now lay a sort of restlessness, the kind possessed only by a man on death row. Beauford slept less and less. Sometimes he went for walks around the neighborhood in his pajamas. Otherwise he drove through the town and passed by his haunts. He thought of the men inside the motel rooms; he could see their thrusting, fucking silhouettes through the windows. He’d been one of them, once, the lucky bastards. He hadn’t fucked properly in weeks. Nowadays he and the whores sat wordless in the motel room and did nothing at all. Eventually one would turn on the TV, and they’d watch the news together. Beauford paid them the same as when he slept with them. 

In some sense, he was a fair man.

 

***

 

The shock of the crash had long worn off; eventually Nina started to disappear on her own. She left notes on the cupboard: gone to town, be back soon, dinner in the fridge. In her absence, he called the old number and heard the familiar voice of the operator on the other end: “Hello, handsome.” But Beauford had nothing to say, so he lay there silently until the operator hung up. He did this again and again. Somewhere between hello, handsome and the dial tone, it occurred to Beauford that the sensible thing to do was buy a gun. 

In the morning he told Nina he was going to the city on business. She smiled blankly in response, and it made him sick. Beauford kept her smile in the corner of his mind while he drove out to the store. He’d learned to shoot from his father and figured it was like riding a bike, the kind of thing you remember the moment it was in your hands again. When the man across the counter handed Beauford the gun and the bullets, they felt familiar and correct. After he paid, Beauford sat in his car and imagined what he’d do. He’d jump out from the closet, catch them naked like babies. He’d point his gun at the gardener, maybe even shoot it into the floor just to give them a good fright. Beauford smiled crookedly to himself. It was a beautiful gun, all silver and gleaming in the sunlight. He imagined Nina and the gardener’s faces at the sight of it. Their mouths would make comical Os. He would laugh at their fear and their shame. 

Beauford began to work up his courage to catch them in the act. He bided his time and played nice. He called the gardener more often, invented tasks for him to do. He sent Nina out with beer, watched them from the window while they talked, wondered if they talked about him. They wanted a new hedge by the fence; they needed tulips for the spring. They needed sage and vegetables, could he do that? Yes, he could, and soon Beauford and Nina had the most beautiful garden in town, ripe with food and lilies and a new magnolia tree to hang its heavy flowers over that new hedge.

He lay in wait for weeks– weeks of weeding, planting, watering, of Nina sitting on the grass watching the gardener, of Beauford sitting inside watching Nina. Then one Saturday he announced he was going downtown. Nina nodded absently. She hardly kissed him goodbye anymore. He whistled as he left and took his car down the road, parked it around the bend where they couldn’t see him. The gardener would be tending to the front of the house today. A thrill rang down his back as he placed the gun in his pocket; he had planned this out very well.

 He crept through the trees and emerged in the back yard. Then he slipped up behind the house. The windows were open, and Beauford could hear Nina and the gardener talking in the living room. They spoke in low voices about hyacinths and perennials. He quietly stepped through the back door– he was brilliant, he’d left it unlocked– and went upstairs to the bedroom. It was easy to hide in the closet. He removed the gun, crossed his legs and sat serenely, like the Buddha. He focused on his breathing. The gun lay cold and heavy on his thigh. 

Then Nina and the gardener walked into the room. They were laughing and breathless as they locked the door. Beauford leaned forward and strained to hear his name. Instead he heard the gardener whispering hers: Nina, Nina. He pressed his eye against the keyhole and watched him undress her, watched her kiss him and unbutton his shirt, kiss him again as she did away with his pants. In seconds they were both naked and on the bed. Beauford’s bed. The gardener pulled Nina onto his lap, and she sat there very prettily and giggled while she ran her hands through his hair. Then they were biting each other. Animals, thought Beauford, and tears began to run from his burning eyes. 

Then Nina spread her legs like wings and took the gardener in. 

And as she rode the gardener she called out to God. She’d never done that with him before. Beauford wept silently in the closet. His rough hand covered his mouth like it used to cover hers. He was pressed up against her dresses and could smell her perfume. Nina could never have enough of him, it once seemed. Only now she wanted more than him, and the gardener was giving her just that: more than Beauford. He listened to their sounds, the wet, uneven beat of good sex. He felt the old warmth begin to flicker where it used to and suddenly there he was; he came to life again, hard and hungry. He unzipped his pants, took a hold of himself, and tried to match their rhythm. 

But he finished too quickly. They weren’t even at the halfway point when he shuddered against the fabric and came, came harder than ever before. 

Now she had ceased calling out God’s name. Instead she cried out for the gardener, the man who lay beneath her and sobbed into her chest. They were getting close, the animals, he could feel it. He could jump out now and scream. But the fire of his passion had grown dim; his impotence claimed him again. He fell against Nina’s dresses in despair. For the first time since his confirmation, Beauford folded his hands and prayed. He prayed for revenge, and then for forgiveness. Then he took the gun and placed the muzzle against his temple, and when Nina and the gardener came together, he pressed the trigger and waited for sweet release. Instead he heard a dull click. He pressed again; another click. Beauford began to cry once more; goddamit, he’d gone soft. Nina and the gardener were silent, now. They lay against each other in Beauford’s bed, under Beauford’s blankets, in Beauford’s house. They were both too deluded by the ecstasy of each other to hear the clicking in the closet, the sound of the pin hitting the empty chamber, again and again and again.

 

 

 

 

 

J. M. is a writer and a believer in the double life. Her other work is published in Spectra Poets, Don't Submit!, and Expat Press.