James Ellroy - The Best American Noir of the Century

“Her Lord and Master” was written many years before it was published, his agent refusing to submit it because of its controversial subject matter. It was first published in the anthology Dangerous Women (New York: Mysterious Press, 2005), and was selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2006.

It was obvious she’d killed him, but only I knew why. I’d been Jim’s friend, and he’d told me everything. It was a shocking story in its way. I found it shocking, at any rate. More than once, when he confided in me, I’d felt the sweat gathering under my collar, on my chest. Goose bumps, and what in a more decorous age we would have called a “stirring in the loins.” Nowadays, of course, we’re supposed to be able to talk about these things, about anything, in fact. There are so many books and movies and television shows claiming to shatter “the last taboo” that you’d think we were in danger of running out of them.

Well, let’s see. Let’s just see.

Jim and Susan knew each other at work, and began a relation­ship after an office party, standard stuff. Jim was Vice President in charge of Entertainment at one of the larger radio networks.

“I don’t know what my job is,” he used to say, “but by gum I must be doing it.” Susan was an Assistant Manager in Person­nel, which meant she was the secretary in charge of schedul­ing.

Jim was a tallish, elegant Harvard grad, thirty-five. On the job, he had a slow, thoughtful manner, a way of appearing to consider every word he spoke. Plus a way of boring into your eyes when you spoke, as if every neuron he had was engaged in whatever tedious matter you’d brought before him. After hours, thankfully, he became more satirical, more sardonic. To be honest, I think he considered most people little better than idiots. Which makes him a cockeyed optimist, if you ask me.

Susan was sharp, dark, energetic, in her twenties. A little thin and beaky in the face for my taste, but pretty enough with long, straight, black, black hair. Plus she had a fine figure, small and compact and gracefully, meltingly round at breast and hip. Her attitude was aggressive, funny, challenging: You gonna take me as I am, pal, or what? Which I think disguised a cer­tain defensiveness about her Queens background, her educa­tion, maybe even her intelligence. In any case, she could put a charge in your morning, striding by in a short skirt, or draw­ing her hair from her mouth with one long nail. A Watercooler Fuck, was the general male consensus. In those sociological de­bates in which gentlemen are prone to discuss how their vari­ous female colleagues and acquaintances should be coupled with, Susan was usually voted the girl you’d like to shove against the watercooler and take standing up with the overnight cleaning crew vacuuming down the hall.

So at a party one February at which we celebrated the launch and certain failure of some new moronic management scheme or other, we watched with glee and envy as Jim and Susan stood together, talked together, and eventually left together. And eventually slept together. We didn’t watch that part, but I heard all about it later.

I’m a news editor, thirty-eight, once divorced, seven years, two months and sixteen days ago. Sexually, I think I’ve pretty much been around the block. But we’ve all pretty much been around l he block these days. They probably ought to widen the lanes around the block to ease the traffic. So, at first, what Jim was telling me brought no more than a mild glaze of lust to my eyes, not to mention the thin line of drool running unattended from the corner of my mouth.

She liked it rough. That’s the story. Now it can be told. Our Susan enjoyed the occasional smack with her rumpty-tumpty. Jim, God love him, seemed somewhat disconcerted by this at first. He’d been around the block too, of course, but it was a block in a more sedate neighborhood. And I guess maybe he’d missed that particular address.

Apparently, when they went back to his apartment, Susan had presented Jim with the belt to his terrycloth bathrobe and said, “Tie me.” Jim managed to follow these simple instruc­tions and also the ones about grabbing her black, black hair in his fist and forcing her mouth down on what I will politely as­sume to be his throbbing tumescence. The smacking part came later, after he’d hurled her bellyward onto his bed and was ramming into her from behind. This, too, at her specific re­quest.

“It was kind of kinky,” Jim told me.

“Hey, I sympathize,” I said. “What does this make you, only the second or third luckiest man on the face of the earth?”

Well, it was a turn-on, Jim admitted that. And it wasn’t that he’d never done anything like it before. It was just that, in Jim’s experience, you had to get to know a girl a little before you started clobbering her. It was intimate, fantasy stuff, not the sort of thing you did on a first date.

Plus, Jim genuinely liked Susan. He liked the tough, working-stiff jazz of her and the chip-on-the-shoulder wise­cracks with the vulnerability underneath. He wanted to get to know her, be with her awhile, maybe a long while. And if this was where they started, he wondered, where exactly were they going to go?

But any awkwardness, it turned out, was all on Jim’s side. Susan seemed perfectly comfortable when she woke in his arms the next morning. “It was nice last night,” she whispered, stretching up to kiss his stubble. And she held his hand as they hailed a cab to take her home for a change of clothes. And she wowed and charmed him with her office etiquette, giving not a clue to the world of their altered state, giving even him only a single token of it when they passed each other, nodding, in the hall, and she murmured, “God, we are so professional.”

And they had dinner together up on Columbus at the Mo­roccan and she went on, hilarious, about the management types in her department. And Jim, who usually expressed amusement by narrowing his eyes and smiling thinly, fell back in his chair and laughed with his teeth showing, and had to wipe tears out of his crow’s feet with the four fingers of one hand.

That night, she wanted him to thrash her with his leather belt. Jim demurred. “Don’t we ever get to do it, just, the regu­lar way?” he asked.

But she leaned in close and smoldered at him. “Do it. I want you to.”

“You know, I’m a little concerned about the noise. The neighbors and everything.”

Well, he had a point there. Susan went into the kitchen and returned with a wooden spoon. They don’t make quite the crack, apparently. Jim, always the gentleman, proceeded to tie her to the bedposts.

“The woman’s killing me. I’m exhausted,” he told me a couple of weeks later.

I put my hand under my shirt and moved it up and down so he could see my heart beating for him.

“I mean it,” he said. “I mean, I’m up for this stuff some­times. It’s sexy, it’s fun. But Jesus. I’d like to see her face from time to time.”

“She’ll calm down. You’re just getting started,” I said. “So she digs this stuff. Later, you can gently instruct her in the joys of the missionary position.”

We had this conversation at a table in McCord’s, the last unspoilt Irish bar on the gentrified West Side. The news team does tend to drift down here of an evening, so we were already speaking in undertones. Now, Jim leaned in toward me even closer. Our foreheads were almost touching and he glanced from side to side before he went on.

“The thing is,” he said, “I think she’s serious.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m all for fantasy stuff and all that. But I don’t think she’s kidding around.”

“What do you mean?” I said again, more hoarsely and with a bead of sweat forming behind my ear.