The Syntax of Seduction Page 2

  Tara . . . and the hypnotist. Bingo!

  I sashayed over to that hynotist. He was a assistant psych instructor from the state college, Jack had told me. And a little down on his luck, by the looks of him. His suit was a bit shiny in the seat and showing a little wear at the elbows and knees. In fact, he had the unmistakeable aura of desperation about him. No wonder he was moonlighting in this hypnotist gig. This guy could be bought. Probably cheap, too.

  "Professor, I was wondering whether I might request a minor favor." He looked up from his drink. "There's a certain woman here . . . and well, I was wondering if . . ." A fifty-dollar bill was all it took.

  "As we have seen, ladies and gentlemen, our two volunteers from the audience have demonstrated the dark mysteries that lie hidden -- unseen and unsuspected -- within the uncharted depths of the human mind. This stalwart young man on my left held several ice cubes in the open palm of each hand until they melted, and with no discomfort or aftereffects. This lovely lady here on my right lay stretched rigid between chairs several feet apart and supported the weight of two men standing on her midsection, with no apparent strain. Yes, my good people, the borderlands of the mind are an unexplored frontier.

  "And now, to conclude this evening's performance, I will administer to each of the volunteers what is known as a posthypnotic suggestion. Triggered by the correct verbal cue, they will involuntarily execute an action I will implant in their subconscious, an action completely out of character for them.

  "Bill, when you hear the word 'kangaroo,' you will begin hopping on your left leg and be unable to stop until you hear me whistle.

  "And as for you, my dear Tara . . . when you hear the word 'kiss' from an old acquaintance, someone you haven't seen in years, you will immediately throw your arms around him, embrace and passionately kiss him. Yes, an intimate kiss, thrusting your tongue deep into his mouth.

  "Now, when I clap my hands three times, you will both awaken, though you will not remember the commands I have just given you."

  With a ceremonial flourish, he clapped three times. The man and woman seated on the "stage," really just a makeshift platform in the middle of the Millers' patio, opened their eyes, and with a dazed look hesitantly rejoined the applauding audience.

  The festivities resumed. People began congregating in groups and the background party sound effects -- chatter and laughter and tinkling of ice in glasses -- once more filled the air. Finally, someone called out, "Kangaroo." There was a minor commotion as a man began hopping around uncontrollably. He was laughing and crying at the same time, but seemed unable to stop hopping. Finally, the hypnotist ended his agony by whistling. There were a few cheers and some nervous laughter, but almost everyone was too absorbed in conversation to notice.

  It was my turn. I casually strolled over toward Tara. Revenge is sweet, I was thinking. Payback for all the times she had made me miserable in my formative years.

  "Hi, Tara," I said.

  She turned around. "Do I know you from somewhere?" she asked.

  "Calvin Coolidge High. Think back twenty years. I had a bad case of puppy love for you, but . . ."

  "Jarvis!" she squealed. "The class nerd! None of our crowd would have been caught dead with you."

  "Certainly you wouldn't have, Tara." I paused. "Kiss."

  A dozen different varieties of bewilderment crawled over her face before her mouth went slack and her features settled into a blank mask. Then her eyes got as big as saucers and . . . she had me in a bearhug and was grinding her lips against mine. I opened my mouth to let her tongue enter.

  There was dead silence around us. A few people snickered and someone nearby hooted. Tara let go of me and blushed scarlet.

  So, I had my petty revenge. I had humiliated her in public. For a brief moment in time, I had been the bigshot and she the patsy. Somehow, though, it left a bitter taste in my mouth. Tara turned and fled.

  As Joanie and I were getting our coats on to leave, the hypnotist approached us.

  "I should perhaps have warned you, sir. In some subjects, a posthypnotic suggestion may precipitate strange behavior. Sometimes they feel a need to justify in their minds the actions that were implanted. For example, that woman who kissed you might convince herself that she'd fallen in love with you. I don't know. I'm starting to have second thoughts about having agreed to your special request."

  "It's a bit late for regrets," I said. "And you didn't seem at all reluctant to accept my gratuity, Professor Mesmer."

  I was wiggling my way into the passenger's side of Joanie's low-slung hotrod. She's a classic sports car freak and had spent years and tens of thousands of dollars restoring a vintage 1959 MG. There were shouts from back of the house. Tara was running toward us, waving her arm. "Wait, Jarvis, don't go! We have so much to talk about!"

  In fact, we had nothing whatsoever to talk about. "Drive," I said to Joanie.

  "Now what was that all about, hmm?" Joanie asked me a few minutes later. We were rolling up the Route 340 entrance ramp. It was only a half hour farther to my house.

  "Someone I had the hots for, way back when I was a sophomore in high school. She wouldn't give me the time of day back then. I happened to spot her tonight at the party, and then with the hypnotist and all, I got one of my Bright Ideas. I slipped the hypnotist a few bucks to choose her as one of his guinea pigs and feed her the posthynotic suggestion to French kiss me when I said 'kiss' to her. And the rest, as they say, is history."

  Joanie laughed. She'd had some run-ins with my brainstorms before, and she wasn't the possessive type anyhow. We had known each other for almost a year and she knew I still saw other women sometimes, and I suspected she had other boyfriends. Yeah, we had a fine old time in bed once or twice a week, but neither of us felt any particular urgency about making a commitment. We were just fuck buddies, after all. Nothing serious. But she had been starting to make possessive noises lately. Biological clock ticking? Or maybe just a female thing.

  Later that night I was lying in bed waiting for Joanie to finish in the bathroom. We'd done it once already and, depending on her mood, might do it again or just drift off to sleep in each other's arms. Either way would be fine by me.

  It's not as if I couldn't live without Joanie's lovemaking. Sure, it provided welcome physical relief for me and she usually took care to show an appropriate level of enthusiasm. But somehow, there was something missing. With her, everything had to be done exactly by the book. And yes, we did in fact have "the book" at our bedside -- The Complete Scientific Guide to Making Love. It went into exquisite detail on the mechanics of, well, fucking. Joanie and I had gotten as far as page 293, and she made damn sure we hadn't inadvertently skipped a section. But afterwards, after we'd made love, I couldn't help asking myself, "Is that all there is?"

  There was a tap on the window. What the hell could that be? Probably just the wind blowing a branch against the windowpane. Shit! I almost had a heart attack right then and there. It was Tara outside, tapping on the damn window. When she saw she had my attention, she began unbuttoning her blouse. She had nothing on underneath. Nothing! That's all I fucking needed. Joanie was due out of the bathroom any second, maybe expecting to find me ready and waiting, and instead . . .

  "Go away, damn you!" I mouthed the words as distinctly as I could and motioned violently at Tara's bare breasts. She must have understood, because she smirked lewdly, then scampered off into the dark. The bathroom door opened and Joanie walked toward me, bare-ass naked and wiggling that bare ass. She wanted some action, all right. I didn't know if I was up to it just then, but I'd give it my best shot. What a fucked up night this was turning out to be.

  What had I gotten myself into? I was staring at my bleeding face in the bathroom mirror early the next morning. Three times I had cut myself shaving. What had been the purpose of that little stunt with the hypnotist last night? Petty revenge? A practical joke? Well, it seemed to have misfired badly.

  Joanie had left for work at the crack of dawn and I was about to sit dow
n for a quickie breakfast of reheated leftovers before I started the commute to my own job. There was a tapping sound from out back. Damn it, that had better not be . . .

  There she was. Spreadeagled against the sliding glass door to the patio. Totally stark naked. Damn! I hadn't realized her boobs were that big. She had shaved her pussy, and it was squashed flat against the glass like a pink orchid with its petals spread wide open . . . and it was starting to do strange things to me.

  Careful, this broad is a fucking whacko, I reminded myself. Totally stark raving insane. But . . . Joanie had left me hanging last night after our second go-round. I was lying flat on my back at three in the morning with a raging hardon and she had snapped at me when I tried to nuzzle her awake. That raging hardon had just now returned with a vengeance. And Tara did sort of look like a maiden in distress. . . .

  I was an hour late to work. Whew! Tara was nothing, if not enthusiastic. She had wanted me to take her in the ass, something Joanie absolutely refused to do. "The Complete Scientific Guide" was ambivalent about that particular practice, and Joanie thought it was out-and-out dirty. Now that I'd tried it, I knew what I'd been missing all these years, and I wasn't sure it was something I cared to live without any more.

  It was all a matter of scheduling. Tara would visit me on weekends and Joanie once or twice during the week. Fortunately, my house was in a relatively secluded area, and at the end of a long, tree-lined cul-de-sac. Pretty much everyone around there minded their own business, so I didn't have to worry about gossip. Still, keeping two balls in the air at the same time is a chancy business.

  Word got out. It always does. Joanie had been giving me funny looks lately. She'd been whipsawed by mood swings, alternately snapping at me and being gushy affectionate. She even let on that she'd be open to trying anal sex. Anything to make me happy, she said. Anything. Then there were those teasing hints about making our relationship permanent. Once, she even let slip the magic word. Marriage! That wasn't her style at all.

  Tara was jealous. She had known since our first run-in at the party about Joanie. Now she was making noises about how she'd like to have me all to herself. She let slip that she wanted nothing more out of life than to be a respectable married woman again. But, if she couldn't manage it with four previous husbands, what made her think there was something special about me? Crazy fucking broad!

  This whole thing was getting way too weird for me. All right, I admit it, I couldn't handle two women at the same time, and both of them starting to flip out, too. The question was, what the fuck could I do about it?

  Run. That's what I ended up doing about it. I'd had no idea just how weird the thing was getting, and I'd be dead and buried if a cop friend of mine hadn't clued me in.

  Joanie had obtained positive proof of what I was doing with Tara. Some incriminating and very explicit shots taken through a telephoto lens eliminated any remaining doubt. Tara, too, had done her share of snooping and found out, to her dismay, I was still boffing Joanie. Then Joanie and Tara had gotten together and decided that they were really sisters under the skin. Their mutual problem was that rat-bastard of a boyfriend. Me. And they decided to do something about that. Something to eliminate the problem.

  Joanie has a lot of money behind her. I knew that when I met her and it hadn't made any difference to me at the time. It does now. She's the heir to the Mr. Hilbert Hair Oil empire and that means . . . that means she has a squad of company goons -- ex-cops and retired military types -- to do her bidding. To track me down and then dispose of the body.

  Tara Domenici's family hails out of Sicily a couple of generations back. Now that doesn't necessarily mean Mafia connections, but, unfortunately for me, in this case it does. So I've got Bruno and the boys after me now, too. As if I didn't have enough on my plate.

  So now I'm sitting here alone in a room somewhere in a town you never heard of, writing all this down. Don't ask where, Joe. It doesn't really matter. The important thing is that I'm still alive. In a couple of years, I figure that Joanie and Tara will call off the dogs and decide to get on with their lives. After all, it isn't worth devoting your whole earthly existence trying to get revenge on a friggin' two-timing boyfriend, now is it? After that, well, maybe I can get back to living a normal life myself.

  You know, old buddy, what the worst part of hiding and being on the run is? It's not being scared. It's not having to look over your shoulder all the time and wondering if this guy or that guy is after your ass. It's the feeling of being totally cut off from humanity. That, and not getting any pussy. I'm lonely and I'm horny as hell. And all over a lousy fifty bucks.

  * * *

  THE SYNTAX OF SEDUCTION

  Can anyone be more lonely than a shy linguist?

  Josiah Finn loved language more than life. To him the spoken and written word was a feast of complex intellectual delights. Studying linguistics gave his existence direction and purpose. It shielded him from the messiness of relationships with his fellow humans. It filled his hours and his days and provided him with everything he needed. Almost everything.

  He was lonely.

  He craved human touch. He needed the touch of a woman as a thirsty man needs water. He was slowly withering away in his abstract wonderland of intellectual delights.

  Then he discovered Sassanid Dynasty love poetry.

  The translations couldn't do it justice. Learning the old Persian dialects had posed no great difficulties for an accomplished language afficionado. The poetry, in its primordial, untranslated version, rang as clearly as a bell in the empty cathedral of his heart.

  His previous attempts to approach women had invariably ended in disaster. They either laughed or totally ignored him. In the shark-infested waters of the dating market, a balding middle-aged professor is dead meat.

  But the poetry, ah, those magic syllables, that hypnotic rhythm.

  Some crazy impulse made him walk into a dance club. The Snakepit was a maelstrom of drifting blue cigarette smoke, mirrors, flashing multicolored lights, and loud heavy metal music that made meaningful conversation superfluous. He sat down at a battered wooden table two vacant chairs distant from a woman. She was a young dishwater blonde, still in her twenties perhaps, and she gave no sign that she noticed his presence. Or would have particularly cared if she had. This guy plops his fat butt down at my table. Dressed in a suit and tie, Coke-bottle glasses, missing half his hair. Older. Old enough to be my father. Geez, must be one of those prof types from the college. Ultra-nerd. Freaky. What's he doing here? Must have got lost.

  He felt totally out of place. He was out of place. What was he doing here anyhow? Sweating and feeling uncomfortable, that was what he was doing here. Get up and leave? Not yet, damn it.

  The poetry. Remember the poetry. Why? Maybe it'll take your mind off this damn nervousness. He began tapping the rhythm on the tabletop. The singsong syllables struggled to emerge from his larynx, then he set them free and chanted. First under his breath, then with growing confidence as the power took hold of him. The woman had turned around and was staring at him. Her eyes were . . . immense pools of darkness. He starts jabbering some kind of nonsense. Can't understand a word of it. Must be foreign talk. He has bad breath. Never mind. What's happening to me? I'm drifting off somewhere. Must have had too much to drink. I'm in a fog. The fog. The Female Fog, my ex used to call it. When my mind would sort of curl up and go to sleep and the Woman Beast in me would take over. That guy's starting to look pretty good. I could --

  Her fingernails were digging painfully into his arm as she snarled at him, "Get me away from this friggin' place. Now. Take me home, damn you!"

  She was a natural blonde. Unless had she dyed her pubic hair too. But he had no attention to spare for inane speculation because he had to maintain discipline. To keep chanting the poetry. Every time he stopped, she seemed to get distracted, to lose interest. Right now she was kneeling astride him, and the sight of his organ disappearing into the darkness of her, then emerging . . . made it hard to remember
. . . the cadence . . . the syllables . . . but he had to keep chanting . . . or she'd lose interest . . . and leave him. What am I doing humping this guy? Don't even know his name. Can't stop. He has bad breath. His armpits stink. Never mind. It feels so good having him inside me.

  They fell asleep in each other's arms, and when he awoke she was gone. The note read, "It was nice being with you, I guess. Best wishes." He knew he'd never see her again. Somehow it didn't matter.

  Josiah had been having problems with his department head at the school. She was a dried-up old prune in her late 50s who seemed to have nothing better to do than to harass him in a variety of petty ways and turn down his grant requests.

  "Pro-fes-sor Finn. Certainly you are familiar with the old adage that scholars either publish or perish. Based on that criterion, you are perilously . . . perilously close to perishing, I'm afraid. If your research fails to yield at least three published articles in the coming academic year, then you might well consider taking up something you are better suited for. Selling used vehicles comes to mind."