Read Online The Lesson of Her Death by Jeffery Deaver - Free Book Online Page B

disrupted by a particular individual.
    Jennie Gebben had been a curious creature. When he’d first read her name in class he’d paused. His mind had tricked him and he misread it. He thought he’d seen
Jennie Gerhardt
, one of Theodore Dreiser’s tragic heroines and a character that Professor Gilchrist discussed at length in his famous paper in which he psychoanalyzed Dreiser. Okun had looked at Jennie across the U-shaped classroom table and held her eyes for a moment. He knew how to look at women. After a moment he commented on the name error. Several people in class nodded in self-indulgent agreement to impress him with their familiarity with Naturalistic writing.
    Jennie gave a bored glance at Okun and responded brashly that she’d never heard of her near namesake.
    He asked her out three days later, a record in self-restraint.
    At a university like Auden, located in a two-cinema, four-screen town, inappropriate liaisons cannot proceed as they would in an anonymous city. Okun and Jennie spent their time walking in the woods or driving out to the quarry. Or spending nights in her room or his apartment.
    He brooded to the point of fetish. Why this fierceattraction? Jennie wasn’t gifted artistically. She wasn’t brilliant, she was a B-minus student with a solid Midwestern artistic sensibility (this meant that she had to be told what was valid and what was not). He was stung by these limitations of hers. When he inventoried what he loved about her he came up with shrinkage: the way she covered her mouth with her delicate hand at scenes of violence in movies, the way she let slip little murmurs from her throat as she looked at a chill spring wash of stars above them, the way she could drop her shoulder and dislodge a satin bra strap without using her fingers.
    Of course some aspects of Jennie Gebben he loved intensely: her suggestions when they were making love that she might like to try “something different.” Did he enjoy pain? Would he please please bury his finger in her, no no not in my cunt, please, yeah, there all the way.… Did he like the feel of silk, of women’s nylons? And she would bind a black seamed stocking tight around his balls and stroke his glans until he came, forceful and hurting, on the thick junction of her chin and throat.
    Several times she dressed him in one of her nightgowns and on those occasions he emptied himself inside her within seconds of fierce penetration.
    These were the bearings of their relationship and as impassioned as Okun felt, he knew they could not be trusted. Not when your lover was Jennie Gebben. The murmurs and whimpers had taken on too great a significance for him. Out of control he crashed.
    It occurred when one night he had blurted a marriage proposal to her. And she, less intelligent, a common person, had suddenly encircled him in her arms in a terrifyingly maternal way. She shook her head and said, “No, honey. That’s not what you want.”
    Honey
. She called him honey! It broke his heart.
    He raged. Jennie
was
what he wanted. His tongue made a foray into the crevice of his lips and he tasted her. That was proof, that was the metaphor:
he hungered for her
. He cried in front of her while she lookedon maturely, head cocked with affection. He blurted a shameful stream: he was willing to do whatever she wanted, get a job in the private sector, work for a commercial magazine, edit.… He had purged himself with all the hokey melodrama of mid-list literature.
    Brian Okun, radiant scholar of the esoteric grafting of psychology and literature, recognized this obsessive effluence for what it was. So he was not surprised when, in an instant, love became hate. She had seen him vulnerable, she had comforted him—this, the only woman who had ever rejected him—and he detested her.
    Even now, months after this incident, a day after her murder, Okun felt an uncontrollable surge of anger at her, for her simpering patronizing
Mutterheit
. He was back on the Nobel path, yes.