The Juliette Society

20

I’m sitting in class, in my usual spot, right in front of Marcus, and he’s going through that climactic scene in Vertigo, where Judy has just revealed her secret to Scottie: that she and Madeleine, the dead blonde he’s been infatuated with, are one and the same person. In doing so, she yanks Scottie out of his fantasy and forces him to confront the truth of his reality, that he’s been consumed by an illusion all along. Marcus is breaking down the final shot, where Scottie is standing at the top of the bell tower where Judy/Madeleine once was. He’s overcome his fear of heights to edge out onto the ledge, but now he’s staring down into the abyss. Staring down at the spot where his obsession drove her; dashed on the rocks to her death.

It feels like we’ve studied this movie a hundred times and more, as Marcus keeps coming back to it over and over for some particular reason. Marcus is so obsessed with Vertigo that I think he could talk about it all day, in every class, and still find new and interesting things to say. I think it’s because Vertigo has everything that Marcus loves about film. All the fetishes and paraphilias anyone could really want and need. Now I know a little more about Marcus, through Anna, I can understand why.

I’m also as certain as I can be of one thing. That just like Scottie, Marcus is obsessed with platinum blondes, the ones that will drive a man to ruin. Marcus is obsessed with Anna.

I guess Anna’s influence must be rubbing off on me too, because I’ve found myself starting to dress more like her. Not just like her, but in her actual clothes. I’m wearing this semi-sheer white tank top with a scoop neck that shows off my bra. I asked Anna if I could borrow it, even though I wasn’t sure it really suited me at all. And I’m wearing her leopard print Lycra leggings and stiletto sandals; the kind of look that tells a man, I am ready to eat you. Even Jack looked at me strangely this morning when I came out of the bedroom dressed and ready to leave, because he’s never seen me wearing things like this. And when he looked at me, I wondered if my crush on Marcus had gone too far.

Now I’m here it just seems like a lot of wasted effort for nothing because Marcus is ignoring me as usual. He’s talking about Scottie’s insistence that Judy dress in exactly the same manner as her deceased doppelgänger, Madeleine; the same clothes, the same hairstyle and hair color. I’m dressing like Anna for Marcus, but whatever I’m doing clearly isn’t working, clearly doesn’t make him hard. Now I know Marcus has a thing for blondes, I’m wondering if I should just go the whole hog and bleach my hair, so that I’m as close to Anna as I can be without actually being her. I can see that Marcus isn’t hard for me because he’s wearing his brown suit pants again.

Marcus is telling us that everything we need to know about Hitchcock, the man, is contained in the films he directed and I figure it’s kind of like the way they say that clothes make the man. I’m deconstructing the meaning of Marcus’ brown suit pants – the pants he always wears – to try to get to the bottom of who he really is. And I wonder if they’re the only pair he owns or whether his closet, when he’s not standing in it waiting for Anna to arrive, is like Mickey Rourke’s closet in Nine and a Half Weeks; filled with multiple pairs of the same set of clothes. The same white cotton shirt with the band collar that he always wears too, and those trousers, tight around the crotch and ass, slightly flared at the legs. The kind of trousers that went out of style at the end of the seventies.

I wonder if he trawls through thrift stores looking for exactly that style, with those exact measurements. The ones that hold his package firm and show it off at the same time. Then I decide that if Marcus has kept his mother’s clothes in pristine condition all this time, it’s probably more likely he bought them new, or almost new.

Marcus must be in his mid- to late forties, and when I do the math, it seems like he would have started dressing like that around the time that puberty hit, at twelve or thirteen. Or maybe a few years later, if he was a late starter.

Those trousers had probably already gone out of style by then. So I decide he must have some emotional attachment to them. That maybe they’re the trousers his father used to wear and, when he first put them on, they made him feel like a man, they made him feel like his dad, and he knew he didn’t want to dress any other way.

I don’t know any of this for sure but I figure that anyone who has a mommy complex as all-enveloping as Marcus must have issues with a father figure who was absent from their childhood emotionally or physically or both. And it makes me feel kind of sorry for him and I wish I could go right up and hug him tight and gently whisper in his ear that it’s going to be alright. But that’s never going to happen because Marcus always seems so serious and unapproachable in class.

Sitting in class, listening to Marcus, I have one eye on the clock because I’m waiting for Anna to arrive. Anna’s late to class, as always. I’m waiting for the door to open so I can start to make a log of the times that Anna makes her big entrance and see if some pattern emerges. Marcus is forty-three minutes and thirty-two seconds into his hour-long lecture, which he somehow manages to time so that they end almost the very second the bell goes. He’s covered all the relevant paraphilias and now he’s onto the fetishes.

I glance again at the clock on the wall above the door. It’s five minutes from the end of the lecture and Anna still hasn’t arrived. She must be trying to push the envelope this time, leaving it till the last possible moment. She really wants to piss Marcus off.

My attention is fixed on the hands of the clock as it ticks its way to the top of the hour, on the crack of the door that I’m waiting to see open. I can hear Marcus’s voice but, for once, I’m not really listening. The seconds tick away. The tension is unbearable. I’m sitting on the edge of my seat, the way I figure people did when Vertigo was first released and people in movie theaters up and down the country watched Scottie chase Judy up the steps of that bell tower to her death.

Then the bell chimes. Not in the movie, in the lecture hall. The hour is up, and Anna’s still not here and I just don’t understand why. She may always be late but she’s never missed a class. Not once. It’s so out of character.

The students start to pack up and filter out the second they hear the bell, the way that people can’t wait to get up out of their seats once a plane has landed and before the seatbelt sign flickers off. I stay exactly where I am, rooted to the spot, with my pen still poised to write notes on my yellow legal pad, which has a series of numbers in the top-right corner that I remember writing but I’ve completely forgotten the significance of. I’m wondering why Anna didn’t come to class and where she could be. I sit there thinking about this until the only people left in this vast lecture hall are Marcus and me.

Marcus is slowly wiping the white board clean of the words he used to illustrate the lecture, as if he’s erasing all trace of his sexual obsessions. He’s wiping away all the words I love to hear him say.

Scopophilia, an obsession with looking.

Retifism, a fetish for shoes.

Trichophilia, a fetish for hair.

When the board is wiped clean, Marcus turns back to his desk, collects his notes, gathers them under his arm, and looks up. He looks up and looks at me. And I realize it’s the first time he’s ever really looked at me. The first time I’ve ever met his eyes and looked directly into them. And I suddenly feel ashamed and embarrassed because I’m dressed in these clothes I borrowed from Anna that really don’t suit me at all.

Marcus looks at me expectantly and I say, I’m waiting for Anna.

‘Who?’ he says.

And I don’t know if he’s joking, but I can’t imagine Marcus does humor. Too intense, too intellectual, too wrapped up in himself. And the other thing about Marcus is, there’s no way to discern what he’s feeling, what he’s thinking, from his face or the tone of his voice. He gives nothing away. He’s that closed and mysterious and that’s why I’m so obsessed.

The blonde girl, I say, who sits behind me. Anna.

And I blurt it out all out, everything she told me, because I’m so nervous that I’m here, in front of Marcus, and he’s talking to me and I’m talking to him. I tell him everything I know. About Anna’s visits, the apartment, the closet, his mother’s clothes.

I’ve never had a conversation with Marcus before, we’ve never exchanged more than a few words, and I want him to know that I know. I want him to know that his kink is OK with me. That it’s not only OK, that I understand. And because I understand, we have something in common. And if he likes Anna, he would like me too.

He listens to me and he doesn’t say a word. He lets me speak, he lets me say my piece and he doesn’t interrupt, and I’m in heaven, because I’m actually talking to Marcus, not just looking and dreaming. It’s as if I’ve been granted an intimate meeting with the pop idol I’ve had a huge crush on since childhood, that I’ve fantasized about, held imaginary conversations with and masturbated over. And now he’s here right in front of me, just me and him, and we’re talking, interacting – at least it feels that way, even if it’s just me talking – and everything I want to say comes out, in a breathless rush, and not necessarily in the right order. But when I’m sure I’ve covered everything and there’s nothing I’ve left out, I stop.

He looks at me with this strange expression on his face that’s halfway between a frown and a smile. I can’t tell whether he’s angry or amused. He looks at me and he says, ‘I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Then he picks up his notes and walks out of the hall without saying another word.

All my illusions about Marcus have been shattered. Maybe he never was what I thought he was. Maybe Anna made up everything she told me about Marcus to feed into my fantasies about him. I’m so confused.

All this time I thought Marcus was my Achilles heel. But I was wrong, so wrong.

It wasn’t Marcus, it was Anna.

Anna is my Achilles heel, the fatal blonde who I’d follow to the ends of the earth.

Where is Anna? I suddenly realize I don’t really know her. I know so little about who she is, or where she comes from. I only know what she’s told me and what she means to me.

When all is said and done, how many people really know us? Know our daily routine: where we go, who we meet, what we do. If something were to happen, if we were to suddenly disappear or go missing, who would know where to look, who to ask, who to call? Friends – even the ones you think of close friends, the ones you believe you feel a deep, abiding connection to – likely won’t know. Family, probably even less.

The more I think about it, the more panicked I get, because I’ve texted and called and she hasn’t picked up or responded, she hasn’t called back – another thing that’s just not like her. It seems like Anna has disappeared without a trace. Almost as if she never existed. I only know of three people who could prove that she did.

Marcus.

Bundy.

Kubrick.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, Marcus has denied all intimate knowledge of Anna, of even knowing who she is.

Bundy has gone into hiding.

That just leaves Kubrick.

I give the cab driver the address to the Fuck Factory as best as I can remember it, and the directions to get there as far as I can recall. And he looks at me as if it say, you really want to go there? No one goes there. But as I hop in, he pulls down the flag on the meter anyway, because a fare is a fare and rather him than anyone else.

We’re driving around and it all looks so different to how I remember. None of it looks the same. And it’s not just because it’s daytime and everything looks different by day. It just doesn’t look like the same place. What I remembered as derelict buildings are actually empty shells of houses that have been half-built, then abandoned. I get the driver to stop three or four times at places that look vaguely familiar so I can get out and look for the graffiti that marked the spot where the Fuck Factory was. There’s nothing there.

I look for evidence that it might have been painted over or wiped off. Can’t find that either. The staircases leading under the street all look the same and I’m not about to walk down on the off-chance that I find the right door. So, eventually, I resign myself to the idea that the Fuck Factory must have been busted again between now and then. Even though then doesn’t seem all that long ago.

The Fuck Factory has disappeared without a trace, just like Anna.

And now there’s only one option left.

I have to find Bundy.

The only person I can think of who would know where Bundy could be is Sal, the bartender at the Bread and Butter.

When the cab pulls up outside, the shutters are down. I bang on them as hard as I can with the palm of my hand. A grouchy, wiseguy voice, Sal’s voice, yells from inside.

‘We’re closed.’

Now, from the limited interaction I had with Sal when I was here last time, I just know there’s little point in getting into a back and forth with him through the shutters. That he’d sooner insult me from the safety of his bar than help me in any way, shape or form.

So I bang on the shutters again.

‘We’re closed.’

He already sounds irritated.

I bang again, for longer this time, pretending I haven’t heard.

A door opens in the shutter, Sal’s grizzled mug peers out.

‘What the fuck do you want, girly. You fucking deaf. Can’t you see we’re closed.’

Not so much a series of questions, more a series of accusations and threats.

‘Bundy,’ I say. ‘Where’s Bundy?’

‘Why d’ya wanna know?’ he says.

‘I’m looking for our friend,’ I tell him. ‘Bundy’s friend, Anna.’

‘Oh, that one,’ he says. ‘Blondie.’

As he says it, his voice softens, his face softens, his whole manner softens. And I think, oh Anna, you didn’t.

Sal face’s pulls back into the gloom and it looks as if he’s fading into thin air like the Cheshire Cat. Then his hand comes out.

I pull out a ten-note and put it in his hand. It withdraws like one of those mechanical piggy banks. I wait for Sal to reappear. His hand comes out again.

I think, cheapskate. Sal is the kind of guy who would spit in your drink if you tipped him too little. I can’t imagine I’ll ever step inside his bar again but, just in case, I reluctantly pull out another ten and put it in his hand. It retreats again inside the hole.

I wait for it to come out again. Sal’s voice sails out of the dark, reciting Bundy’s address. I repeat it after him in my head to lodge it in my brain.

He says. ‘Give Blondie my love.’

The door slams shut. I shudder.

I’m starting to feel afraid for Anna. Where is she? One day she was there and next there’s no trace of her. Now I have to swallow my pride. Now I have to go and see and Bundy.

Bundy’s not surprised to see me. He’s just disappointed I didn’t come sooner. So he could tell someone his side of the story.

‘I had nothing to do with it. I swear I didn’t kill those girls.’

That’s the first thing he says as he ushers me into his apartment. His voice is cracking as he says it. Bundy’s world has collapsed and he’s a wreck. The Department of Justice has seized all of his domain names, shut down the sites – every last one of them – and initiated a Federal investigation into suspected pandering and racketeering. His livelihood is gone, his reputation is in tatters.

I’m not interested in his welfare, I only want to know what happened to Anna.

‘Bundy,’ I say, ‘where’s Anna?’

He doesn’t answer, so I have no choice but to go in.

Bundy’s apartment has to be seen to be believed. He’s making money hand over fist but he’s too cheap to splash out on anything other than the studio apartment he’s always lived in. It’s so crammed with stuff that you can barely move, you can barely get through the door.

He ushers me inside and says, ‘Sit down.’

I look around and it’s not as if there’s nothing to sit on – like the way Anna described Marcus’ apartment – it’s just that it’s all covered in stuff. DVDs, magazines, comic books, toys, dirty underwear. And another thing, Bundy’s apartment really stinks. There are trays of half-eaten microwave food, open pizza boxes with rings of crust, completely intact, as if he’d somehow managed to eat the filling from the inside out.

It’s not as if I’m intending to stay, as if I even want to be here, so I say, ‘It’s OK, I’ll just stand.’

I lean against the wall and feel it start to give way behind me, then realize it’s not part of the wall at all but a floor-to-ceiling tower of those white paper boxes with the wire handles containing Chinese takeout food.

It’s been less than a week since the story broke on Forrester Sachs, Bundy’s only been hiding out for three or four days. He couldn’t possibly have eaten all this food in that time. Unless the anxiety made him binge-eat. Bundy’s a little chubby anyway so it’s hard to tell if he’s gained weight. I figure Bundy’s one of those eternal teenagers who never loses his puppy fat, it just gets less cute with age.

There are stacks of baseball hats that still have the tags attached and boxes of trainers he’s never worn, never even opened. Bundy tells me he wears a new pair of trainers every day and dumps the old ones in the trash like they’re candy wrappers. He says it’s his one indulgence. But I suspect the only reason anyone would wear a new pair of shoes every day is because they’ve got really bad foot hygiene.

Suddenly it dawns on me why it smells so bad in here. Not from moldy pizza and discarded Chinese food. From Bundy’s rotting feet. It’s the kind of odor that’s really hard to cover up and seems to linger on everything, like the smell of vomit. It smells so bad in Bundy’s apartment that I’m trying to breathe through my mouth. I want to get out of here as quickly as I can, but Bundy’s decided his woes are so great that he wants to tell me his entire life story, from beginning to now. From before he was even born. From the day his parents decided to name him.

Bundy’s sitting cross-legged on the floor like a sulking child playing with his toys. ‘I’m not a bad person,’ he says. ‘I was just made this way.’ As he says it, he’s absent-mindedly stuffing a Chewbacca action figure head first into a pussy-in-a-can.

Bundy’s apartment is crammed with toys – plush toys and sex toys – and to him they’re all the same. A pair of Care Bears are positioned on all fours, facing away from each other, both split at the seams to accommodate a double-ended dildo that’s been forced into their stuffing. There’s a Teletubby wearing a strap-on as a face mask. It’s as if he tried to upgrade his obsessions and got stuck halfway, somewhere in the middle between adolescent and twenty-something jerk-off, but ended up hopelessly infantilized, obsessively compulsively sexualizing everything in his reach that was previously wholesome and pure.

He has a huge life-size poster of Britney Spears on the wall, wearing Daisy Dukes with the buttons undone, and her hands on her hips as if she’s about to peel them off, a white cotton crop-top that seems specifically designed to show off the curve of her tits, and a look that says, you know you want to fuck me, but think again, Buster.

It’s Britney Spears in her prime, when she was every man’s fantasy; the all-American hot-bodied blonde cock-tease. And before she broke a million male hearts by reminding them of the psycho girlfriend you wished you’d never met, let alone thought of putting your cock inside.

He also has a large collection of Star Wars figures lined along his mantle, but only wookiees. He’s not interested in anything other than wookiees. Bundy tells me he’s always loved wookiees. And he thinks it might be the same reason he only likes women with natural pubic hair, women who never shave.

Bundy says that’s the reason he’s so fixated on blow jobs – ‘the receiving, not the giving,’ he takes pains to point out to me – is that it really doesn’t matter whether she’s shaved or unshaved. Because he never gets that far.

For him, oral pleasure staves off hirsute disappointment. But the upshot is he’s continually sexually unfulfilled.

Bundy’s pouring out all his woes to me, his sexual history, his personality flaws, and I don’t want to listen any more. I want to tell him how angry I was about receiving money after visiting the Juliette Society.

‘You set me up,’ I say.

I can feel myself getting mad but I don’t want to show it. I don’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing that he’s rattled me.

‘Set you up how?’ he says. ‘With Anna?’

‘The money, for that party.’

‘What party?’ he says.

‘The Juliette Society,’ I reply, like he doesn’t know.

‘Who?’ Bundy says.

I say it again.

‘The Juliette Society, Bundy.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he says. ‘I never paid the girls. I only took the money.’

I’m confused, but I need to get to the real point of my visit. ‘Bundy, I’m seriously worried, where’s Anna?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I swear I don’t know.’

Just like he swears he didn’t kill those girls.

‘Did you do the same thing to Anna,’ I ask angrily, ‘try to extort money from her?’

‘I wouldn’t do that to Anna,’ he says. ‘I’d never do anything bad to her. I love Anna. I’ve wanted her so bad,’ he says, and he’s almost close to tears. ‘I don’t even care if she’s shaved or not.’

Bundy tells me he tried to get with Anna so many times and did everything he could to impress her. She’s the only woman he’s ever spent more than ten bucks on, other than his mom. He bought her gifts, he bought her jewelry. But Anna always brushed him off.

‘She told me she loved me like a brother,’ he says, ‘but she prefers men to boys.’

Bundy’s looking up at me with big sad eyes and he wants me to tell him, it’s OK. But there’s not a whole lot I can say because I know exactly what she means. He’s only pining for Anna because she broke his heart. And, as a coda to his tale of woe, he keeps repeating the same two things over and over, like a broken record.

‘I didn’t kill her,’ he says, ‘and I didn’t kill those girls.’

‘I believe you, Bundy,’ and as I say it, I realize I do believe him. ‘But do you have any idea, any idea at all about where she might be?’

And, finally, he comes out with it. ‘There was this party she was going to. You might find her there.’

‘What party?’ I ask suspiciously.

But before he’s even replied, I realize that I’m going to have to go there and I don’t have a choice.