C13 Nora Evans

The top of the long drive, surrounded by sycamore trees,

Chauncey parked the Bentley at the foot of the stairs in front of Nora’s parent’s Georgian mansion. A valet opened his door.

“Nice to see you, Mr. Gibbons,” the valet said.

Chauncey ignored the pufter and went around the front of the car and up the stairs.

When the butler opened the door, Nora was right behind him.

“Oh, darling,” she said as she reached up to kiss him, pressing her greedy little fingers to his breast pocket where she knew he kept a fat supply of coke in a silver cigarette case. Then she stepped back abruptly.

“Chauncey, you look a fright,” she said. “Let’s go upstairs to my room and freshen up! Mummy and Daddy are out in the greenhouse fucking with their orchids.”

She took his hand and pulled him through the foyer.

She must really need to get high, Chauncey thought to himself. Nora was the biggest coke whore he ever met. She had no problem buying it herself. She just loved to mooch off a man.

They headed up the stairs.

“I’ve simply got to tell you about Delia Ross,” she whispered. “On Christmas Eve?”

“You know how she gets.”

At the top of the stairs, they turned down the hall to Nora’s

room at the end of it. Nora’s room hadn’t changed since her mother decorated it when she was twelve years old.

It was still all white lace, the most indulgent display being that of the canopy sheltering the plush white bed, piled with pillows and stuffed animals.

When Nora tried to alter some things when she was eighteen, Maxine threw her out of the house in a drunken rage and told her never to come back. Maxine looked for any excuse to throw her daughter out of the house in a drunken rage.

Then when she was sober, she called Nora 24-7, pleading with her daughter to come home. Maxine didn’t hesitate to bribe Nora, trash Nora, and manipulate her like a child, if it helped Maxine obtain her objectives.

Nora, on the other hand, loved milking the bitch for everything she could get.

In the meantime, she whored around the city with her wealthy friends.

Nora pulled the dazed and staggering Chauncey to the bed and pushed him down on his back.

“Who have you been fucking all night!” she asked and slapped him across the face so hard that it put him out of his pain for a second.

Chauncey didn’t know where he was, but he wished he could stay there. But the slap carried the impact of a sledgehammer. It released a searing set of shockwaves across his brain.

Once the shockwaves exited through the back of his brain, they seemed to circle his head, and then come around the front again and slam him in the forehead yet again.

Chauncey raised a hand not only in defense but to shield his eyes from the blinding light above her.

“Get me a glass of water, you spoiled little bitch.”

Nora’s tantrums were short lived as long as they were met by a set of pejoratives that put her in her place. She could switch from sadism to masochism in less than thirty seconds.

“Oh, I’m so sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

She made up for it with a series of tongue kisses until he bit down on her tongue till she screamed. When she drew back in sur- prise, he slapped her across the face.

“Oh, you’re so much fun,” she said, delighted, and bounced off the bed to get him a glass of water from the bathroom.

But the ringing of her slap slammed his brain in a way that jarred an image loose. His wrists and feet were bound by leather cuffs chained to the four posters of the Victorian bed.

China Doll was sitting on his chest, dressed in black leather, her bosom bursting out of the small tight jacket. Her tiny tits had been enhanced to the point that they were ridiculously disproportionate to her body.

“You like my tits?” China Doll asked as she bounced up and down on his stomach.

He hadn’t touched her. He hadn’t kissed her. After a few lines and drinks in the living room, she suddenly turned to him and said, “Let’s do the fucky!”

She was blowing his mind. Her attitude of taking command had blindsided him. She took command from the moment she got in the car. She took command in the living room. She took command in the bedroom.

Still, there was some novelty in that, which excited him.

It was usually he who put the leather cuffs to work on other women before he got down to the rough stuff. His life was full of coke whores who could care less about what he did to them, once they had a couple snowdrifts up their nostrils. They were prone to moaning with pleasure, rather than screaming in horror, when he took the whip to them.

But then the image vanished like the last second of a dream when Nora walked back into the room with a glass of water and exclaimed:

“Delia Ross fucked Daddy last night!”

Delia Ross was Nora’s best friend. They began going out to bars in boarding school. They drank their way through Wellesley. They attended each other’s abortions. They shared the same hospital room when they had labiaplasty, and then walked around in agony together for the next six weeks.

At the Debutante’s Ball, they both blacked out and were found half-naked in the back seat of a pimped-out Firebird TransAm with two Chicanos, who were still dosing in the front seat at six in the morning.

It was rumored that Delia’s father had spent millions putting his daughter through a prestigious college, given the payoffs to local authorities and his donations to the university trust when Delia’s nights in the drunk tank were becoming the stuff of myth in the small New England town.

He bought her four years of low Ds, and she stood on the stage at graduation, wildly waving her diploma at anyone who would notice.

“Delia fucked your father?” he asked.

Resting back on the pillows, Chauncey was pleading with his mind to retrieve his dream image, at the same time he was trying to quell the choking in his throat by sipping the water. Some water spilled down his shirt. Nora snatched the glass from his hand.

“Here, let me do it, darling. You’ve had a long night of whoring while I was left home to diddle myself under the Christmas tree.”

“Where and why—and how—did your father fuck Delia Ross?”

“Well, she didn’t actually fuck him,” she said in that demure finishing school manner of hers, as if to qualify whatever went down as something less immoral than actual coitus.

“Well, what did she do, darling?” he asked with that phony tone of rapport they shared in which they called each other darling at every opportunity as if to suggest they were as good as married.

“Delia gave Daddy a rim job in the back of the limo,” Nora said.

“On Christmas Eve?”

“Well, he offered her a ride home from the McKinsey’s party,

when Mummy passed out in a bedroom upstairs.” “She rimmed him?”

“Well, not exactly rimmed,” Nora said again in her demure way as if to reduce the sickness that went down to a lesser sickness.

“She was giving him a blowjob,” she said, “when her tongue slipped.”

“When did she tell you this?”

“She called me at ten o’clock this morning! Oh, God, did I have a headache.”

“Why did she tell you this?”

“Oh, Christ, you know Delia.”

“Well, darling, there’s a difference between blowing and rim-

ming,” Chauncey said.

“Don’t you think I know that?” she said to challenge him.

He considered their nights of abandon together.

“I’m sure you do, darling,” he softened.

“He couldn’t come.”

“Daddy couldn’t come?”

“Too much Johnny Walker.”

“Well, that’s nice to know—but what on God’s earth made this

sexual monstrosity happen on the way home from the McKinsey’s Annual Christmas Party?”

“Daddy was pissed off at Mummy, and Delia was pissed off at Jamie Lee.”

Jamie Lee was Delia’s fiancé, much in the same vein as Chauncey. He only wanted Delia for her father’s money.

“They were both drunk, of course,” Chauncey said.

“Oh, severely,” she said.

“Hopefully, Daddy was in the middle of a blackout.”

“I’m not sure. He’s been moping around the house all morning.” “The orchids should clear his head.”

“Except that Mummy walked in this morning and found Daddy and Delia snoring on the couch.”

“Naked?”

“Stark.”

“Well, this should be a lovely Christmas dinner.”

“Now don’t go telling anyone about Daddy and Delia—espe-

cially the rim job.”

She pretended to threaten him with a wagging finger. Nora

liked nothing better than circulating vicious gossip about Delia Ross. She didn’t hesitate to embellish her stories with things that never happened.

Neither of them had an ounce of respectability left in the social circles they traveled in, but they vied with each other as to which of them could spread the trashiest rumors about the other. One of Chauncey’s favorite fantasies was imagining the two of them going down on each other in boarding school. But he could never be sure whether they had slept together, whether they were still sleeping together, or whether they planned to sleep together in the future.

Little mattered to Chauncey, as long as her father died of a cor- onary in the next ten years. That would be the easiest money he ever made.

“I won’t say a word,” Chauncey said, pushing the glass of water aside and lying back on the pillow. “Her chastity’s intact with me. But I pity the man who would dare.”

“But guess what!” she said.

“What?” he answered flatly.

He knew where this was going. Nora loved to run out her sto-

ries till everyone got bored.

“Delia’s in love with Daddy!” she exclaimed. “She’s nuts to have

Daddy! She’s talking about hiring a hit man and taking out Mummy!” “How much coke was she doing?”

“Oh, she wasn’t doing coke—she was smoking crack!”

“Was Daddy smoking crack?”

“Of course not! Daddy only does lines.” “I’m so happy for everyone involved.” “She talked to me for an hour!”

“That’s not much for Delia.”

Chauncey was getting sick of the story.

“She said she’s been in love with him since she was sixteen!” “Did she fuck him in the limo or on the couch?”

“I never said she fucked him!” she said again in that demure

finishing school manner, as if fucking were the most disgusting crime of all. Typical Nora.

Her biggest dramas so often failed to provide the exciting con- clusion they first promised. She just liked to get your attention. Once that was accomplished, she began to go into withdrawal and com- pletely shut down.

“What about the rim job?” he asked.

Nora set the glass on the table and hopped off the bed.

“I must get dressed for Christmas dinner, Chauncey!”

It always amazed Chauncey that absolutely nothing seemed to

ground Nora. It was impossible to sleep with her. Her body twitched all night, and sometimes he would turn to face her, only to find her snarling at him, in spite of the fact that she was fast asleep.

An entire wall of the room concealed a walk-in closet that would have sufficed as a small condo for many people. But for Nora, it was a process of interminable chaos, in spite of the fact that a maid came twice a day, just to order her closet again.

If Nora had nothing to do, which was most of the time, she might spend morning till night in there, changing clothes. Again, the maid paid visits to deliver meals and other requests on a silver tray, which she set on the gilded table inside the walk-in closet.

Nora kept the closet door closed and locked most of the time, so the maid was forced to knock and wait till Nora was disposed to see her, which could take up to half an hour. One time the maid waited for hours to deliver a meal, which Nora claimed was urgent and could cost the maid her job if she wasn’t prompt in bringing it to her in record time.

Chauncey pulled himself out of bed and dragged himself to the ornate table by the bay window. He took the silver cigarette case from his breast pocket. The silver cigarette case had belonged to Rudolph Valentino. Chauncey bought it at a morbid auction.

At the same morbid auction, he picked up a gold razor blade that had been found resting on John Belushi’s quiet chest, the night he overdosed in Bungalow Number Three at Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. He felt he had achieved the perfect coke carryall.

After a couple lines, Chauncey began to recall some fleeting images from the night before. China Doll was sitting on his chest in a leather outfit by Galliano. He had checked the label when they were doing lines in the living room.

China Doll was sitting on his chest with a riding crop in one tiny hand, and a large black dildo in her other tiny hand. “Me fuck you?” she asked in her best Berlitz English.

Chauncey could hardly answer. He was wearing a leather hood. Only now did Chauncey realize that she had gagged his mouth with silver tape. Chauncey violently shook his head.

“Me like fuck you too,” China Doll said in what was somehow interpreted as agreement.

But Nora broke his train of thought when she appeared in the same Galliano outfit that China Doll was wearing. She was dressed in tapered black leather pants with stiletto heels.

But the pants had a drop-crotch, giving the illusion of high fashion, at the same time that the drop-crotch carried back to her ass, hiding the fact that she had none. The bosom bursting out of the tight leather jacket that China Doll was wearing only bursts with skin and bone in Nora’s case. Nora was as bulimic as ever. Her arms were like toothpicks; her legs like sticks.

Her bones shown through her physiognomy so much that Chauncey was always wincing from unexpected jabs in the middle of making love. Chauncey loved to fuck her for the sheer menace of it. He reveled in the disgust he felt for her. It was like an aphrodisiac. He tossed her in bed like a green salad. She loved it.

Anyone who didn’t respond appropriately to her self-hatred was considered a wimp She loved being slapped. She loved being spanked. His trash talk sent her over the top.

“Do you like it, darling?” she asked, turning a heel. Chauncey couldn’t look at the leather outfit.

“Do you have something a little sluttier? “Chauncey! It’s Christmas!”

“Are you wearing that for me or your mother?”

“Maxine, of course,” she said.

“Just don’t make Christmas dinner another slug fest.”

Nora and Maxine had a way of battling it out at a brutal prim-

itive level when it came to joint appearances. They were fiercely competitive over who could project the most repulsive sex appeal. Watching Maxine fighting for parry with her younger daughter was a source of humor to everyone but them. Their Freudian conflicts were so profound that they seemed blinded to any suggestion that the one had produced the other. Maternal and daughterly sensitivities were replaced by bare- knuckle combat. Both preferred love-hate relationships, but only if hate prevailed.

As for gossip, they preferred their victims charred.

When Nora saw what Chauncey was up to, and realized he completely ignored her outfit, she affected what might best be called a bad runway model auditioning for a porn film, as she made her way across the room.

“Well, what have we here?” she said.

She pressed her pussy against his back and leaned over and kissed him on the neck. But her eyes were fixed on the white powder he was refining with John Belushi’s gold razor blade on the small mirror inside the lid of Rudolph Valentino’s cigarette case.

“This is how we get through dinner, baby,” he replied, “with those sick fucks you call your parents.”

Chauncey was not looking forward to Maxine hanging all over him throughout the meal, hoping to humiliate her daughter.

“Oh, don’t be so hard on Mummy and Daddy,” Nora said. “Once we announce our engagement, we can stop pretending to be children around them and politely tell them to get lost.”

Chauncey set down John Belushi’s gold razor blade.

From the tiny clamp at the side of the mirror, he pulled the black diamond straw once owned by Marlene Dietrich, a gift from the Fuhrer himself.

Chauncey had a thing for Fuhrer. His business model was based on Hitler’s Panzer movements.

“What did Mummy say when she found Daddy with Delia?” he asked.

“She was too hungover to talk about it,” Nora said. “I’m sure they’re hashing it over in the greenhouse right now.”

He lifted the mirror to her and said, “How about a duet of White Christmas at the dinner table?”

“Oh, that would be marvelous, darling, but let’s do it after we announce our engagement.”

She snatched the black diamond straw from his fingers. Chauncey began to sweat. The engagement ring. What happened to the engagement ring?

China Girl was out of the room. He was lying there, dazed. She had removed his cuffs. His asshole was killing him. For some reason the dildo was in his hand. He shook his feet. His feet were free too. He tried to get up once. He tried to get up twice. The third time didn’t even count. Each time he fell back on the bed in agony.

What had she done to him? He was unconscious through most of it. When he was conscious, it was as if he was looking through a thick white fog to see her shadowy image there.

Then he woke up to her saying, “Okay! My turn!”

He passed out again. When he woke up again, he tried to roll over. It worked. He rolled over again. The crash on the floor woke him up.

She was gone.

“Let me see the engagement ring again!” Nora said after she snorted her two lines.

Then she snorted his two lines.

“Go change your outfit,” he said.

“Chauncey!” she said. “You’re sweating!”

“It’s the outfit. It’s making me sick.”

He was starting to confuse her with China Girl. He couldn’t

look at her. Even when he was out of the dream, he was still in the dream. He watched her eyes begin to bulge in the coke mirror. She refused to look at him.

“Chauncey,” she said in a hushed voice. “You’re not getting scared, are you? You’re not going to back out on me—are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Daddy’s already sent out the press releases.”

“What?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Two weeks ago?”

“Well, you have to give the newspapers a little lead time,

darling.”

“Nora, are you telling me that your parents already know we’re getting engaged?”

Her eyes fluttered in the mirror. She started fussing with her mascara.

“Chauncey, you know nothing’s real around here.”

Chauncey should have known. Chauncey should have known it all along.

The old man needed to announce to the public of any impor- tance that his homely, bulimic, scandal-plagued daughter had found a respectable sucker to take her off his hands.

The scandals could be blamed on Chauncey now.

Chauncey pulled the mirror away from Nora’s narcissistic gaze and began cutting more ice with John Belushi’s gold razor blade. But all he could see in the mirror was Nora standing over him, wiping any spare coke from her nose along the surface of her gums.

The Galliano leathers. He pulled himself up by the bed. He limped across the room. He saw her in the bathroom rifling through his trousers.

“Chauncey, if you back out on this, I’ll kill myself,” he heard Nora saying above him.

“Nora, please go change your outfit.”

“Oh, what would you like, darling—something soft and feminine.”

“Try something green and red.”

“I have antlers, if you’d like.”

“As long as they’re not Galliano.”

“I did get some new lingerie by Balenciaga,” she said. “Would

you like to see your bride to be at her slutty best, darling?” Chauncey didn’t have an answer. Chauncey didn’t have an answer for anything. All he could think about was tearing the trou-

sers out of her hand and slapping her around the bathroom.

He dragged her by the hair, completely unconscious, into the bedroom. He threw her on the bed. He held her down. He fastened the manacles to her hands and feet.

When she came to, he slapped her unconscious again. He went

to the dresser drawer. He found the Beretta. He loaded the clip. Hewent to the bed and sat on top of her. He waited for her to come to again. Then she opened her eyes.

“You have tiny dick!” she said. She was laughing. He thought she was mad.

“You sucked my tiny dick!” she said.

She started laughing again, but quickly stopped. He watched

her eyes grow wide with terror.

“Me Joe China girlfriend!” she said. He was sick of her bad English. “Joe China kill you!” she screamed. He pulled the trigger.