He placed his pink hands against her thighs and began spreading her legs. She did not resist much; for a moment, at least, she was too horrified and amazed by what was going on here to resist much.

And that’s exactly the right attitude, the more familiar voice inside her spoke up. Just lie there quietly and let him shoot his squirt. Afterall, what’s the big deal? He’s done it at least a thousand times beforeand you never once turned green. In case you forgot, it’s been quite a fewyears since you were a blushing virgin.

And what would happen if she didn’t listen and obey the counsel of that voice? What was the alternative?

As if in answer, a horrid picture rose in her mind. It was herself she saw, testifying in divorce court. She didn’t know if there still were such things as divorce courts in Maine, but that in no way dimmed the vividness of the vision. She saw herself dressed in her conservative pink Donna Karan suit, with her peach silk blouse beneath it. Her knees and ankles were primly together. Her small clutch bag, the white one, was in her lap. She saw herself telling a judge who looked like the late Harry Reasoner that yes, it was true she had accompanied Gerald to the summer house of her own free will, yes, she had allowed him to tether her to the bedposts with two sets of Kreig handcuffs, also of her own free will, and yes, as a matter of fact they had played such games before, although never at the place on the lake.

Yes, judge. Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

As Gerald continued to spread her legs, Jessie heard herself telling the judge who looked like Harry Reasoner about how they had started with silk scarves, and how she had allowed the game to go on, progressing from scarves to ropes to handcuffs, even though she had quickly tired of the whole thing. Had become disgusted by it. So disgusted, in fact, that she had allowed Gerald to drive her the sixty-three miles from Portland to Kashwakamak Lake on a weekday in October; so revolted she had once again allowed him to chain her up like a dog; so bored with the whole thing that she had been wearing nothing but a pair of nylon panties so wispy you could have read The New York Times classified section through them. The judge would believe it all and 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!

Yep; damned good shot, wasn’t it? the new voice mused.

You kicked your husband in the balls! the Goodwife screamed. What in God’s name gives you the right to do something like that? Whatgives you the right to even joke about it?

She knew the answer to that one, or thought she did: she’d done it because her husband had intended to commit rape and pass it off later as a missed signal between two essentially harmonious marriage partners who had been playing a harmless sex-game. It was the game’s fault, he would have said, shrugging. The game’s,not mine. We don’t have to play it again, Jess, if you don’t want to. Knowing, of course, that nothing he could offer would ever cause her to hold her wrists up for the handcuffs again. No, this had been a case of last time pays for all. Gerald had known it, and had intended to make the most of it.

That black thing she had sensed in the room had spun out of control, just as she had feared it might. Gerald still appeared to be screaming, although no sound at all (at least none she could hear) was now coming from his pursed, agonized mouth. His face had become so congested with blood that it actually appeared to be black in places. She could see his jugular vein-or maybe it was his carotid artery, if that mattered at a time like this pulsing furiously beneath the carefully shaved skin of his throat. whichever one it was, it looked ready to explode, and a nasty jolt of terror stabbed Jessie.