ON A GRINDSTONE OF SELF-DENIAL, WITH THE diligence of a true obsessive, Brittina Dowd had sharpened herself into a long thin blade. When she walked, her clothes seemed certain to be cut to shreds by the scissoring movement of her body.
Her hips had been honed until they were almost as fragile as bird bones. Her legs resembled those of a flamingo. Her arms had no more substance than wings stripped of their feathers. Brittina seemed to be determined to whittle herself until a brisk breeze could carry her aloft, high into the realm of wren and sparrow.
She was not a single blade, in fact, but an entire Swiss Army knife with all its cutting edges and pointed tools deployed.
Corky Laputa might have loved her if she had not also been ugly.
Although he didn’t love Brittina, he made love to her. The disorder into which she had shaped her skeletal body thrilled him. This was like making love to Death.
Only twenty-six, she had assiduously prepared herself for early-onset osteoporosis, as though she yearned to be shattered in a fall, reduced to fragments as completely as a crystal vase knocked off a shelf onto a stone floor.
[386] In their passion, Corky always expected to be punctured by one of her knees or elbows, or to hear Brittina crack apart beneath him.
“Do me,” she said, “do me,” and managed to make it sound less like an invitation to sex than like a request for assisted suicide.
Her bed was narrow, suitable only for a sleeper who did not toss and turn, who lay as unmoving as the average occupant of a casket, by far too narrow for the wild rutting of which they both were capable.
She had furnished the room with a single bed because she’d never had a lover and had expected to remain a virgin. Corky had romanced her as easily as he could have crushed a hummingbird in his fist.
The narrow bed stood in a room on the top floor of a narrow two-story Victorian house. The lot was deep but too narrow to qualify as a residential building site under current city codes.
Almost sixty years ago, just after the war, an eccentric dog fancier had designed and built the curious place. He lived in it with two greyhounds and two whippets.
Eventually he’d been paralyzed by a stroke. After several days passed during which their master had not fed them, the starving dogs ate him.
That had been forty years ago. The subsequent history of this residence at times had been as colorful and on occasion nearly as grisly as the life and ghastly death of its first owner.
The vibe of the house caught Brittina’s attention just like the high-frequency shriek of a dog whistle might have pricked the ears of a whippet. She’d purchased it with a portion of an inheritance that she received from her paternal grandmother.
Brittina was a graduate student at the same university that had provided multigeneration employment for the Laputa family. In another eighteen months, she would earn a doctorate in American literature, which she largely despised.
[387] Although she had not blown her entire inheritance on the house, she needed to supplement her investment income with other revenue. She had served as a graduate assistant to keep herself in chocolate-flavored Slim-Fast and ipecac.
Then, six months ago, Channing Manheim’s personal assistant had approached the chairperson of the university’s English department to explain that a new tutor would be required for the famous actor’s son. Only academicians of the highest caliber need apply.
The chairperson consulted Corky, who was vice-chairperson of the department, and Corky recommended ............