Naked Came the Stranger

ZOLTAN CARADOC

Gillian realized there was no legitimate reason to include Zoltan Caradoc on her list. He had been married four times – most recently to Paige Marchand, the dancer – but they were never marriages in the customary sense. It had been several years since he had allowed a woman to share his bayside castle for more than a night or two. In fact, for nine months of every year Caradoc was a virtual hermit, a professional loner, a man who spent long hours fashioning sentences while studying the sullen winter waters of Long Island Sound.

These were his working months, his caged-in months. Caradoc spent the time roaming from one room to another, one glass-fronted cubicle to another, always within sight of the water and always surrounded by the tape recorders and stereo sets and color television consoles and electric typewriters. He lived three-fourths of his life in an ultra-modern electronic womb. Cable umbilicals carried him regular progress reports from the outside world; sensitive microphones were always handy to transmit and preserve his thoughts and memories for posterity. And though only forty-four years old, Zoltan Caradoc had already strung together enough words to more than equal the lifetime output of Proust.

And every year, as the cold season came to an end, Caradoc once again ventured into the real world. Ventured… no, say rather, exploded. He would, in that three-month interval, be photographed stalking chamois in Bhutan, hunting wild boar in Bulgaria, pursuing teenyboppers in San Francisco.

Gillian, like most of the cognoscenti, kept up with the ever growing legend that was Zoltan Caradoc. She recalled the news account of his bloody encounter with a killer shark off Tanzania; Caradoc had lost three fingers of his left hand but had saved the life of a native oarsman. And she recalled another hair-raising adventure – his being arrested in his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel in the company of three blonde call girls, an ancient Negro sculptress and a Shetland pony. Gillian had first met Caradoc in early winter – midway between Morton Earbrow and Joshua Turnbull, as she now measured time. It was during the power failure, the electric blackout of King's Neck that lasted twenty-seven hours. Caradoc had endured the power failure as long as he could and then had deserted his suddenly lifeless machinery for the candlelit warmth of Morarity's Shamrock Bar & Grill. Gillian, too, had stopped in for a moment's warmth. She stood, her back to an open fire, and she instantly recognized his face – the face she had seen on the jacket of a book called Mountaintop.

The photo, however, was no more than a sterile reproduction of the original. Never before had she seen a man with such piercing blue eyes, diamonds blazing out of a square face beneath a mop of coal-blue hair that curled and roamed over head and neck. The nose had been broken more than once, the jaw was firm, the total effect was softened slightly by the full and sensual lips. The author was still in his working garb – jeans with ragged cuffs, a faded denim shirt with rolled-up sleeves. His forearms were thick, powerful, corded with veins and bristling with hair. Gillian noticed the absence of three fingers from his left hand.

The stool beside Caradoc was empty and Gillian walked to it.

"Martini," she said. "On the dry side."

The bartender looked momentarily bewildered and Caradoc roared with laughter.

"Not here," he said. 'Here, Mrs. Blake, you better settle for a beer."

"A beer then," she said to the bartender before turning to Caradoc. "My mistake. I didn't mean to be so radical. How did you know my name?"

"The same way you know mine," Caradoc said. "I read the papers, same as you do."

"You've got me there," Gillian said, smoothing her sweater.

"You didn't have to do that."

"Didn't have to do what?"

"That bit of business with the sweater," he said. "I noticed them without any assistance from you."

"I like your work," Gillian said. "I loved Mountaintop." Mountaintop was the latest. The critics had described it as a bristling, earthy and not unpoetic story of girls on the loose and boys on the bum. Kids with flowers in their hair and fire in their loins, to quote the Time critic. In the novel they had demonstrated for peace, group marriage, male prostitution and free public toilets. In the memorable final scene they had all stripped, guzzled cheap wine and chewed peyote. There had been a wild dance in the firelight followed by the hero expressing his love to a twelve-year-old girl and a three-year-old ewe. Gillian had sensed then, sensed again now, that the author had lived the scene. And that was Caradoc's strong point. Even his harshest critics agreed that he wrote from life, that this was the literature of experience.

"It wasn't a bad book," the author said. "It wasn't as good as some, not as good as Anteaters and Belly Dancers, but it wasn't bad."

As he spoke, the overhead lights flickered once, twice, then remained on. The end of the power failure. Gillian was sorry in a way. The candles that had lined the long dark bar at Morarity's were extinguished one by one; the saloon could now be seen in all its 60-watt splendor. Sawdust on the floor, grime on the windows, glasses coated with dust. The six other patrons of the moment, the regulars, should have been swept out with sawdust; they wouldn't have noticed.

"My place or yours?"

"What?" she said.

"My place or yours?" he repeated. "I'm assuming you don't want this to end any more than I do."

"Yours," she said.

Her intentions were innocent enough. There was no reason to look on Caradoc as a prospect. There was no marriage to be tested. And so, humming gently to herself, she calmly followed the writer as he drove through downhill woodland toward the shore. The house, every window now ablaze with light, sat on a rock base in a protective cove. The tide was high and the bay water had risen above the foundation and lay flat below his living room windows.

The wide tile-floored entranceway to the house was dominated by a huge wire statue, a male nude with an erection. Indeed, the small placard proclaimed the title of the work to be "Male Nude With Erection." Each room held its own array of wonders. Gillian noticed the names – Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, Pollock, Warhol, Rivers – and was suitably impressed. There was a huge portrait of Caradoc's left eye – no mistaking the brilliance of that blue. An oil of Paige Marchand in bra, panties and leather boots. Ivory tusks, a mounted stingray, loudspeakers on every wall.

In the main room Caradoc paused to depress a wall switch that simultaneously dimmed the lights and started the record player – jetting the raucous sounds of the Jefferson Airplane from every available wall.

There were none of the standard overtures. Caradoc simply stood in the center of the huge room and undressed. First his jacket and his shirt, then his trousers and his shorts. Though Gillian had done nothing, said nothing, the author was in a state of visible excitement. The sight was impressive enough. What was even more impressive was the realization that Caradoc had served as model for the wire sculpture beside the front door. There was no mistaking the likeness; Gillian found herself wondering how long he had been able to hold the pose.

"What do you think you're doing?" she said.

"It's the visuality," he explained. "Very important."

"I think you've misjudged me, Mr. Caradoc," she said.

"I don't think so, Mrs. Blake," he said. "And I want to be completely honest with you. Everything that you say from now on will be recorded."

"Will be what?"

"Taped," he said. "If I ever write about this experience, if there is anything here worth writing about – and that should be a challenge to you, Mrs. Blake – I want to get it right, letter-perfect. I want to tell it like it is."

"You're wasting your time – there'll be nothing to tell." She backed slowly toward the door. Caradoc, crossing the room with surprising agility, stood between Gillian and her escape route. Still in a clear state of sexual excitation, he advanced toward her.

"Don't," she said. "Please don't."

"I won't do anything you don't want," he said.

"I don't want anything but out," she said.

"That's what you say," he replied. "Some day you'll thank me for what I'm going to do."

Gillian, paralyzed now, saw his right hand, his good hand, reach out, felt his fingers close slowly over the top of her sweater. And then in one swift sure move, he ripped the sweater away from her. Then he reached for the skirt, shredded that.

"This is rape," Gillian said.

"It may begin as rape," he said, "but that's not the way it generally winds up."

"Please don't," Gillian said. "I don't want this to happen, not this way. I'll come back some other time when we feel better. I'll…."

The promise was interrupted as his hands, gentle now, reached around her and expertly unlatched the brassiere strap. As it fell to the floor, Gillian turned and ran toward the first door she saw. A mistake – it was the bedroom and it was too late to escape. Caradoc stood at the doorway to the room, then came toward her, forcing her to retreat back onto the most enormous bed she had ever seen.

He stood over her then and smiled down at her. She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of the man but there was no way to eliminate the other sensations. Gillian felt cold. She shivered, braced herself for the attack that never came. What Gillian recalled later was the surprising gentleness of Caradoc as he applied himself to his task. For long moments he did not put a hand on her. There was only his mouth to reckon with – a mouth fastened itself to her throat, then moved down to her breasts. She could feel his tongue as it traced the outline of her rib cage, paused to explore her naval, continued to chart a downward course.

Despite herself, despite a fear she could not really explain, Gillian felt the warmth returning. The mouth kissing, pleading, cajoling, insisting. Gillian felt herself relaxing, felt the tension flowing from her legs, felt her body beginning to writhe, responding to the mouth with the harmonic precision of an orchestra responding to a conductor's baton. The tongue was alternatingly gentle and impertinent, loving and demanding – very much like Caradoc himself.

Gillian was aware of an argument raging within herself, a great debate between body and mind. She felt herself lose all control over her legs. The insistent tongue urged them open, and they opened. She felt her back stiffen and arch. It was not what she wanted, not really, but she found her hands reaching down to Caradoc's head, holding tight to his long blue-black hair, encouraging him now, guiding him, directing him.

And then it ended.

"All right, Mrs. Blake," she heard him say: "You can go home now."

"What do you mean?" she said.

"I was just testing your reactions," he said. "I think I've got what I wanted."

"You mean this – all this – was just an experiment?"

"That's all, Mrs. Blake," he said. "You can go home now… if you really want to."

He stood before her still physically aroused, taunting her, waiting to hear her beg for him to continue. Waiting to record her pleadings for some future novel. She had an unholy desire to reach out and touch him, to hold him there, to make him plead for her. But she did nothing. She retrieved her panties from the foot of the bed and stepped into them. She found her brassiere in the living room and put it back in place. She found an overcoat in the hall closet and put it on. Caradoc watched all this in mute wonder, in a seeming state of shock.

"Amazing!" was all he said.

"What is truly amazing," she said, "is your ego."

"Hey," he said, "you'll come back, won't you? You'll come back and visit me, won't you?"

"I'll think about it," she promised – that and no more – and then she was gone.

She thought about it and she came back. There had never been a rationalization, a justification, a way to explain her repeated visits to the isolated house by the water's edge. But time and time again she returned. Possibly because Caradoc became such an effective antidote for the sordid little affairs as they ended, perhaps because he was a bracing tonic for the new affairs that were about to begin. Most likely, however, because in a sense they both were scientists, experimenters seeking life's more elusive truths. Even their interests were similar – while he explored love, she explored marriage.

It ended only because it had to end. Caradoc drained her of time and emotion. With Caradoc she had found more than a mutuality of interests, more than sex, more than the conversation that never grew stale or repetitive. There came a time, as winter gave way to spring, that she thought, not without alarm, that it might even be love. If it was love, it would ruin everything – the show, possibly herself. If not love there was no reason to continue. And so, one day early in June, as Zoltan Caradoc was saying that this year, for some reason, he didn't feel like going out on one of his annual three-month hunting expeditions, Gillian calmly did what had to be done. She ended it.

After that there was just one bit of communication. One last letter to become a treasure beyond price for literary historians tracing the career of Zoltan Caradoc. The envelope carried a postmark from Haiti.

Dear Gilly,

You have left your mark on King's Neck. The mark of the cat. The claw-shaped scar splayed across a neighborhood of broken lives. And I, almost as well as you, know the toll (God knows you boasted about it to me often enough). The dead, the destroyed, the psychotic, the forever sad. The marriages that you snapped in two as if you were breaking straws.

And finally, me – in a sense the beginning and the end. The mirror you saw your victories within, now shattered. I hope you have your seven years' bad luck; it is the least I can wish you. This is my last message, my curtain call for the part you made me play. After all the writing, all the words I was creating for you, I end our communication with a properly prosaic letter. But do not wrinkle that aristocratic nose. I dare not bore you, even now.

This letter will be like English beer, short and bitter. It must be brief because I have two ladies waiting for me in the next room. One is a pretty little blonde virgin of sixteen with a maddening resemblance to the White Rock girl. The other is a wildcat black who is a virgin only in her left ear. Sharing a bed with the two of them and exploring their reactions to the same events shall be my modest entertainment this cool summer evening. It is a curiously refreshing diversion. I call it sin and tonic.

But hold. This letter is serious. I am writing to humble myself before you, to acknowledge in cold blood what I have only recently come to realize: That in the end it was I who was your greatest triumph – your masterpiece of creative destruction. Your master piece.

(One day I shall be crucified on a cross of puns.) And did you know it all along? Did you, my sweet, cynical destroyer?

We had our moments. We did, dear Gilly, didn't we, in those days? At least admit that. The priestess and the poet. I knew your game. I knew all the tables were rigged for the house. But I saw no reason not to play. After all, unlike your other conquests, I had nothing to lose. There was nothing you could take from me, nothing you could separate me from, nothing you could destroy. Or so I thought. And I accepted your love for what it seemed to be. So I made you my muse – all the muse that's fit to print, as your newspaper friends would say.

The others didn't matter. I saw you bowl them over like tenpins, one after another. Down they went. The muscleman, the abortionist, the gangster, the prizefighter, the poor Jewish husband, the mad pornographer – I don't remember their names. I can't tell the losers without a score card. Did you keep a score card, Gilly? I wouldn't be surprised. You cut them all down, Gilly; you cut them all down with the sharp edge of your sex as if they were saplings thirsting for the ax. But not Caradoc – not the Shakespeare of Suburbia, the Messiah of the Misbegotten Generation, the Nonconformist of Time's cover.

I saw them come and go, saw you mark up the scores. I watched, knowing that after each one you would return for the real thing. We may not have made the earth move, Gilly, but we made my mind spin – and until now that has always been the same thing. All those times before the fireplace, the flames turning your skin to copper, your breasts to the Spanish hills below Valencia at sunset, your hollows to the textured porous shadows of sifting sand. And I had a gypsy for a muse. Making love before that fire, feeding the flames with our own fuel, lying there gazing through the skylight, reaching the stars.

You would smoke then, and I would talk of the future. I was going to be immortal, wasn't I? My work. What a legacy for the world. What greater gift for my fellow man? What greater dedication than to distill in words the essence of life?

What bullshit.

Does that shock you? Not likely. After all, bullshit is what the Billy & Gilly shows are made of. I suppose nothing could shock you, not now. Not you, dear Gilly. I suppose you planned it all. I had miscalculated, overestimated your longing for immortality. You were to be my blonde Dark Mistress, remember? Graduate students and scholars were going to pore over my works in the twenty-first century and write endless theses, complete with footnotes, on the identity of Zoltan Caradoc's' golden goddess. Only now, now that you are gone, do I realize that you are quite content to be listed in the book of life as Mrs. William Blake, the round-heeled half of Billy & Gilly. Three cheers for Salinger's Fat Lady. Hip, hip, hurrah!

The point is that I have not written a line, Gilly, not a word, since the day you left. I have given up the words. I relinquish them to those who still believe in them. That was your greatest triumph, Gilly, greater than any of the marriages you wrecked, or the deaths you caused, or the pain you produced.

When I finish this letter, in a moment, I am going into the bedroom to make perverse love to my virgin and my whore. It will be recorded on film and tape, part of the research, my research. I will read the transcripts and study the pictures. But the words will not come. They do not come any more.

I had no mate, Gilly, so you separated me from myself. It was brilliant. I don't know how early in the game you planned it that way. But I want you to know how completely you succeeded. Macbeth hath murdered sleep but he is no match for Gilly. Dear Gilly hath murdered Art. Gilly hath murdered immortality.

Yours, alas - Z.



EXCERPT FROM "THE BILLY & GILLY SHOW," JULY 18TH

Gilly: Well, Billy, I see we're coming to the end of our last show, our last show before our vacation. Four glorious weeks to ourselves. just the two of us. Then, when we come back, well… shall we tell them?

Billy: I don't see why not, darling.

Gilly: I never could keep a secret – but you knew that when you married me. We're moving again! That's right, the next time you hear this program, we'll be right back where we belong, right back in a lovely new apartment here in midtown Manhattan.

Billy: That's right, darling. But don't you think we owe our listeners a little explanation? It seems only yesterday – golly, I guess it was just about a year ago – that we announced we were moving out of the city and into suburbia, into our new home in King's Neck.

Gilly: Yes, I suppose an explanation would be germane to – oh, don't frown, sweetheart, everyone knows that means relevant. And I suppose an explanation would be relevant here.

Billy: As our listeners must know by now – they certainly hear it often enough – the purpose of this show is to look at marriage "in the crucible of modern living." Gilly: Well put, darling.

Billy: And what better crucible than suburbia? For us, and I hope for our listeners, it has been a valuable year, a year of experimentation, an opportunity to look at…. Gilly: Yes, dear, all that is true enough, but we may as well admit it hasn't all been sweetness and light. In fact, just the other day we both seemed to notice at the same time what has been happening in King's Neck. One marriage after another has crumbled, just gone up in smoke….

Billy: I think you're mixing your metaphors, darling…. Gilly: Anyway, we both noticed that our neighborhood is beginning to look like a ghost town. It seems as though there's a FOR SALE sign in front of every home. Billy: Not that we regret having lived in King's Neck. It was, as I was saying a moment ago, a splendid opportunity to examine some of the forces that tend to twist and pry apart marriages. And nowhere do you see these forces as clearly as in suburbia.

Gilly: The pressures are simply terrific. The husbands and wives of King's Neck are, in a sense, separated. Not legally separated – but they certainly go their separate ways from morning to night. I've had many talks with the housewives of King's Neck and I've never see so many frustrated females in one place. There is the constant striving for material goods – new cars, new swimming pools – and somewhere along the way they seem to have lost sight of spiritual values. The effect this can have on a marriage can be simply devastating.

Billy: I think we can count ourselves among the lucky ones….

Gilly: In all fairness, Billy, it isn't just luck. To make a marriage work – and how often we've said this! – people have to work at it.

Billy: I couldn't agree with you more wholeheartedly, darling. And I think we might add something else here. The first thing a person notices about a suburb such as King's Neck is the rootlessness. And with that, the restlessness. People all too often tend to turn their backs on tradition, tend to forget the valuable lessons that have been carefully preserved and handed down by past generations.

Gilly: I hope you're not going to say something as, well, basic as, "The family that prays together stays together."…

Billy: But maybe….

Gilly: Perhaps, after all, it is something basic and simple. But maybe it goes something like this: The family that stays together stays together. I realize many of our listeners will feel that togetherness is just a little on the corny side. But I think we can say that togetherness has always been important to us.

Billy: Indeed it has, darling. Well, I see our time is running out….

Gilly: Remember, our address may be a new one, but we'll be back at this same spot in just four weeks.

Billy: So you be thinking about us because….

Gilly: We'll be thinking about you.