Love Creeps: A Novel Read online

  He wished she knew the art of seduction. How to play hard to get, blow hot and cold. At least then he’d get momentary respites from her stalking while she blew cold. It would be so refreshing. He would search his course catalogs for a class for her. It might even teach her how to give up.

  Alan pushed Lynn away. She stroked his jawline, caressed his left buttock. He pulled his hips back slightly, so she wouldn’t feel his erection.

  “God, I love you,” she murmured.

  He had backed up against the bookcase, and he couldn’t back up any farther. The shelves dug into his back.

  “You’re hard!” she said.

  She rapidly unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned and unzipped his pants, lowered them and his underwear.

  “God, you turn me on,” she said.

  He pressed his lips shut, his arms spread at his sides, hands resting on shelves. He was looking away from his penis, the way he would look away when blood was being drawn at the doctor’s office.

  She was rubbing her thumb around the tip of his penis. He held his breath. He would not move an inch.

  She pulled him to the bedroom and to the bed, laid him on his back, and straddled him. He stared fixedly at the ceiling.

  She slid her tongue between his lips, licked his teeth. Nothing worked. She gave up trying to kiss him, and just rode him, her cheek against the side of his head. He could hear her panting in his ear. Her breath was warm. And then she sounded different. The panting turned to sobbing, and she rolled off him and curled up on her side, her back to him.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “You’re not responding,” she said.

  He sighed, got dressed, and moved to the living room. She followed him.

  Alan was starting to think about Jessica again, and it made him sad. He suddenly remembered that Lynn didn’t know he and Jessica were broken up.

  “You’ve made yourself quite at home, cooking a meal, and everything,” he said. “What if Jessica walked in?”

  “This is the first time you brought her up. You haven’t used her as an excuse for why we shouldn’t do what we were doing. That’s a good sign.”

  “A sign of what?”

  “That she doesn’t have such a strong grip over your affections. Or maybe a sign that she doesn’t satisfy you completely. I mean, you know, you’re cheating on her.”

  “No, I’m not. I would never cheat on her.”

  Lynn frowned, then her features softened into a smile. “You’re not?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s great news!” she said. “When did it happen and over what?”

  “It’s not great news. I’m very upset.” He sat on the couch.

  “Oh, don’t be!” she said, hugging him from behind. “I’ll make you better. You’re my honey.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. Everyone can decide who her honey is. The honey can’t object. The honey has no say. The honey can only decide who his honey is, not whose honey he is.”

  Lynn took off Alan’s shirt. Not this again. He tried to resist, but with so much lassitude that she succeeded in undressing him completely within three minutes. She spread plastic from the dry cleaners under his butt and over the couch.

  She had just put on a CD—Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

  She stood behind him. Using a dinner knife, she was spreading something on his arm. In her other hand, she was holding a jar of honey. Harmless enough. She covered his entire body with honey. His penis became erect, but he ignored it.

  He picked up the newspaper and began reading an article on lawns.

  “See, now you are literally my honey. You can’t object to that,” she said, continuing to futz about him, touching him, and when he looked down at himself again, he saw that she’d covered his body with fresh mint leaves.

  “I really should be going to work,” he said.

  She next put Rice Krispies all over the honey, which made his body bumpy, as if he had a horrible skin condition. He suddenly wondered if she was going to eat him.

  She then sprinkled cocoa powder over his entire body, turning him dark brown in addition to bumpy. He looked monstrous, she noticed with satisfaction. She’d always had a fantasy of having sex with a monster. She thought that this act of covering him with food might win him over: it was whimsical, spontaneous, playful, artistic, charmingly childlike, and sensual.

  She used Nesquik on some parts of his body and Ovaltine on some others. She asked him to close his eyes. As she was sprinkling Nesquik on his face, he said, “I really should be going to work. What about my job? I can’t go to work looking like this.”

  “It’s already two-thirty in the afternoon. Don’t you think it’s a little late to get to work?”

  “Better late than never.”

  She then brought out a can of whipped cream. The organ music was passionate as she sprayed whipped cream on his nipples and over his pubic hair and balls and all over his penis.

  “If I don’t go to work, I’ll become homeless. I’m already a beggar. A beggar for mercy. For solitude.”

  Since there were no cherries in the kitchen, Lynn came back with a blueberry, which she placed on the tip of his vertical penis.

  She had left his feet and the top of his mostly bald head clean. She knelt at his feet, covered them in olive oil, and started giving him a foot massage. He jerked his foot a few times because it tickled. She slid her fingers between his toes. The pleasure, which he was trying to ignore, kept infiltrating itself into his article about lawns.

  The doorman buzzed. Alan and Lynn looked at each other.

  “Can you get that?” Alan said.

  Lynn put down his foot and went to answer the in-house phone. “Yes?” She listened. She looked at Alan. “The doorman says that Roland wants to come up.”

  Alan didn’t respond.

  “I’ll tell him not to let him up,” Lynn said.

  “No! Don’t.”

  “Don’t what? Don’t let him up?”

  “No, don’t tell him not to come up.”

  “You want him to come up?”

  “Yes.” Alan paused. “Yeah, tell him to come up.”

  “Why? Are you insane? And look at the state you’re in. He’ll be upset to see me here. He might lose it.”

  “Good, let him kill us. What else have I got to live for, anyway? Let him up!”

  Lynn told the doorman to let Roland come up. She opened the front door. She perched herself up on the back of the couch, behind and above Alan, her legs on either side of him, the back of his head in her crotch. She began giving him a head massage.

  Roland walked in, stared at the spectacle.

  Alan was glad to be covered in food, because he realized it was a testament to Lynn’s obsession, to the power he had over her. That was one way of looking at it, and he wanted that to be the way Roland looked at it.

  And Roland certainly was looking. The way Lynn and Alan were sitting, she looked like his throne. Her fingers on his head were his crown. As she massaged his scalp, the skin on his face was being stretched, his eyes were pulled back into slits. Alan tried to shoo her away. But she stayed attached to him, the tips of her fingers clasped to his mostly bald head like tentacles, like a crown of clinginess.

  Alan had clearly won. Nothing could have made Roland feel more defeated than this display. It went far beyond a scene of domestic bliss, which certainly would have been discouraging. Alan had become a powerful, grotesque beast, majestic. Roland blinked a few times. He had an urge to bow and leave but forced himself to stay.

  “What do you want, exactly?” Alan asked.

  Roland didn’t answer at first. Eventually he said, “Can I take Lynn?”

  Deliver me from her, deliver me from her, Alan thought. What he said was, “I’d rather you not take anyone by force, but in principle, yes, you can take her, if she’ll go with you.”

  “You’re so weak and spineless, no wonder your girlfriend dumped you,” Roland said. “It’s
amazing she was with you to begin with.”

  “Lynn, please go into my bedroom and bring back what is at the bottom of the third drawer from the top.”

  Lynn obeyed. She came back holding Jessica’s gun.

  “Kill him,” Alan said.

  Roland stared at the gun in Lynn’s hand, pointed at him.

  Lynn didn’t shoot.

  “If you don’t shoot him, I want you to leave and never return,” Alan said.

  Lynn still didn’t shoot. Finally, she said to Alan, “If I kill him, I’ll go to prison and never see you again.” She placed the gun next to Alan on the couch.

  Roland rushed toward it. Alan didn’t move. He allowed Roland to grab the gun. Roland shot at Alan. No bullets. Roland tossed the gun back on the couch. “You wimp. You weren’t going to kill me.”

  “That’s right, I wasn’t,” Alan said, haughtily. “Now, please, the both of you, get out.” He sounded tired.

  Lynn sat next to Alan on the couch and begged him not to make her go.

  “Could you please take her with you?” Alan said to Roland. “My feet are oily, and I’m afraid I’ll slip. And I’m exhausted.”

  Roland dropped a paper clip, picked up Lynn, and carried her to the door, screaming.

  “One moment,” Alan said, and Roland stopped. Alan got up, the sheet of plastic clinging to his butt. He approached, careful so as not to slip. He stroked Lynn’s hair, and said, “I was mildly excited by the idea that you would do anything for me. So I tolerated your presence. But you didn’t pull the trigger. I’m not the least excited any longer.” What he said was true, but one did not always utter something just because it was true. He uttered it in yet another attempt at being unappealing.

  They left.

  Alan fetched the bullets from his bedroom closet. He loaded the gun.

  He took out a piece of paper and on it wrote Jessica’s mother’s phone number followed by the request that Pancake should be taken care of by Jessica. He added a few words: “No one is to blame for my decision to end my life. I’m just not a happy man. Mom, I love you very much. You were and are the best mother imaginable. Please, don’t be too sad. I’m okay now. Love, Alan.”

  He left the note near the rat cage.

  He said good-bye to Pancake. He knew Jessica would take good care of him. She was a rats-and-guns type of woman.

  Alan pressed the barrel of the gun against his temple. He slid it down his cheek. He placed it in his mouth. He tasted the honey and Nesquik that had gathered on its tip. He licked it clean, then stuck the barrel farther into his mouth.

  The fire alarm went off. He dropped the gun, grabbed Pancake from his cage, and ran out of the apartment. He could smell smoke. He started racing down the stairwell, cocoa powder flying off him as he ran. He hadn’t bothered closing all the stairwell doors in the building recently, and now there was a fire! He wondered who had started the fire, whether it could have been Roland. A few mint leaves flew off him like loose feathers off a bird. The Rice Krispies slowly rolled down his surface. They were still held on by the honey, but no longer crispy, and the whipped cream dribbled down his nipples and thighs. He slipped and fell a couple of times because of the olive oil on his feet. He was carrying Pancake in one hand and raised that hand high in the air every time he fell, to protect the rat.

  He was surprised that nobody was in the stairwell, but since he lived on the top floor, he had always known he’d be last in line, with no one rushing past him in the event of a fire. Anyway, they were probably all taking the elevators down, the fools. They knew nothing about fire safety; they didn’t even keep the stairwell doors on their own floors closed.

  When he reached the sidewalk, panting and shaking, most of the tenants were already gathered there. They were horrified at the sight of this chocolate-covered naked man holding a rat. They assumed his skin looked the way it did because he had been scorched by the fire, that his skin was burnt to a crisp and already bubbling up, blistering and doing gross stuff. The whipped cream was some weird fluid the body produced when it got burned: The groin and nipples started foaming. The mint leaves were confusing. The blueberry was long gone. Had it still been there, the tenants might have understood.

  Alan reassured them that he was just covered in food. He walked through the crowd, petting Pancake to calm him, and asking the tenants where the fire was, how it had started. They didn’t know for sure. Some said it was on the fourteenth floor, but they kept changing the subject back to the chocolate covering his body. They seemed to be trying tactfully to remind him that he was naked. They asked him whether he might not like to cover himself up, but no one offered any clothing. Alan didn’t understand why his neighbors concerned themselves with such a trivial matter as his nudity. Wasn’t it clear he had been engaged in some kinky sexual game? Was it really the time to giggle about chocolate-covered nudity when there was a fire in the building? What about perspective?

  It was a chilly afternoon.

  A cop came by and told him to cover up or he would arrest him for indecent exposure.

  “But there’s a fire in my building!” Alan said.

  “Exhibitionists always have excuses,” the cop replied.

  A rumor began spreading that the fire was started by a young woman from the fourteenth floor, technically the thirteenth floor, the bad-luck floor, who was burning a contract her boyfriend wrote and signed in his blood that he’d never lie to her again. And then he did. So she burned the paper and left the fire unattended to cry on her bed.

  Alan approached the woman from the fourteenth floor—the fire starter. The crowd of tenants parted to let him through.

  He stood in front of her and said, “How could you leave burning paper unattended? Are you insane?”

  “I’m sorry it caught you at that bad moment, when you were doing whatever you were doing,” she said, pointing to his chocolate-covered nudity.

  “There is no good moment to cause a fire,” Alan replied.

  “I’m sorry. I was disillusioned.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “Everyone already knows about it. You burned a contract in which your boyfriend swore he’d never lie to you again, but he did. Tough. So what?”

  “Get away from me. You’re naked and disgusting and infringing on my privacy.”

  “And you started a fire. I’m one of your victims.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “On candles it says, ‘Never leave burning candles unattended.’ Haven’t you ever had a candle?”

  “Get him away from me,” she said, cringing. “You’re naked and disgusting and holding a rat.”

  Alan puffed out his chest and loomed over her. He then hopped up on a little wall and spun around, facing the tenants, his rat in one hand. With his other hand he pointed to the disillusioned fire starter. “And whose fault is that? Am I the one who chose to leave burning paper unattended just when I happened to be naked and covered in food? What did you expect me to do? Stay in my apartment and burn to death with my pet?”

  “Listen, I can understand why you’re upset,” the woman said. “You’re feeling humiliated and frustrated because I obviously interrupted you in the middle of some perverted sex game, but you’re not improving your lot by screaming.”

  A businessman from 3A said, “It does look like the fire alarm caught you in the middle of a titillating situation. It must have been a drag to be interrupted.”

  “No! I was in the middle of trying to kill myself, okay?”

  A few tenants laughed, assuming it was a joke.

  The businessman smiled. “What suicide method involves being covered in chocolate?”

  “None. But being covered in chocolate does not stand in the way of suicide,” Alan said.

  “No? I think it should,” the man said. “Finding oneself covered in chocolate periodically and for any reason is a sign that one’s life is rather exciting and not worth ending, in my opinion.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.”

/>   “If I’m wrong, why did you run out of the building to save your life, just when you were about to end it?”

  “I was saving my rat, not my life.”

  People were silent.

  Alan added, “Every day of my life I go up and down the stairwell, closing every door on every floor to protect myself and others from maniacs like her who leave burning, broken, bloody contracts unattended!”

  After a moment, the businessman said, “And now, do you still think you’ll kill yourself?”

  “Possibly not. The moment passed.”

  “So the rest of your life will be thanks to her.”

  “Yes. And if my life is bad, which it probably will be, as it has mostly been, it’ll be thanks to her, too.”

  “You can’t blame things on others.”

  “Just watch me. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with how comforting it is, how mentally helpful it is to blame things on others. You all have your childhood molesters, your bad parents, your abusive teachers, people to blame everything on. I never had one. I thought I did, recently, but I was misled. Now I finally have mine.” He pointed his finger at the woman from 14C and proclaimed, “The rest of my life will be her fault!”

  The ex-psychologist homeless man, Ray, looked on, askance, wearily transfixed. He felt beaten down, worn down by the flurry of questions coursing through his mind like a drug whose effect he was trying to resist. It looked to him as though Alan were auditioning to be his patient, and Ray had to admit it was a convincing display of insanity.

  Alan suddenly heard a loud voice from the crowd shout, “Drop your weapon!” He looked in the direction of the voice and saw two policemen pointing their guns at him and asking him again to drop his weapon.

  “No, it’s not a weapon, it’s my pet rat!” Alan shouted.

  “Drop what you’re holding!” they said.

  “No! Look, it’s not a gun, it’s just my pet rat, Pancake. He’s not like a dog. He’ll run away if I let him go.” Alan raised Pancake by his tail, letting him dangle. He held the tail between his thumb and index fingers, the rest of his fingers lifted high and spread out, to show that he wasn’t hiding anything else. Pancake struggled at the end of his tail, and abruptly swung up and bit Alan’s hand.