3

by Julie Hilden

  One night, he asks me to have sex with him ‘a different way.’ Even knowing what he must mean, I reluctantly say I will.

  I lie on my side and Ilan lies on his side next to me. I am very afraid of the pain I anticipate, but I concentrate on relaxing my breathing, my body, as he tells me I must.

  He enters me just slightly and I close around him. I watch the huge, curtained window of our bedroom. I wince as he softly kisses the back of my neck. I can hear children’s voices, from the playground across the street. I think, They cannot possibly even intimate what will happen to them when they grow up. I think, They are blind.

  ‘You need to relax,’ Ilan says again. I feel a new anxiety though, for I know this has to happen; he wants it for the sense of possession, because I did not lose my virginity with him, and also for the shame: I am to turn that over to him.

  ‘Relax, I won’t hurt you,’ he says. ‘I have all the time in the world.’

  As he pushes inside me, I can feel the small negotiation of muscle, feel him calibrating when he will hurt me and stopping precisely at that point. It is so erotic, it almost makes me cry.

  It is this moment, perversely, that finally convinces me to trust him completely. Over all the years we do this, I never bleed. The point is that he knows he can make me; and he refrains.

  One day later that summer, Ilan and I take the subway up to the Museum of Natural History to see an exhibit, a roomful of butterflies. The butterfly-arium, Ilan calls it; there is some formal name, too, that I now forget.

  Once admitted, we walk gingerly, in case the butterflies alight on the floor. We wait patiently for them to settle on our clothes or hair or hands. It feels like waiting for a kind of grace, against high odds. But for each of us, one alights.

  We hold out our sleeves to compare them. Mine is a dark blue swallowtail whose wings bear spots like eyes and narrow into long, pendulous ends as they slowly open and close. His is an orange-and-black monarch, glamorous and quotidian, its markings brilliant as a peacock’s and characteristic as a tabby’s.

  Our life is like that then. It simply comes to us like grace, like a gift. I remember it all, you know. I would rather not remember it but I do. I remember how still I held for the butterfly; I remember exactly the way it dipped in the air when it flew away.

  I remember it because Ilan was there, because that was how magical life seemed when I was with him. I still wonder, How can it have all gone so wrong?

  Although I know it all did happen, because I lived it, I still do not fully believe that it is really over. In my mind, always, I am still beginning it. The butterfly is still alighting. There is still a world that comes to me so easily, so weightlessly, without a trail of blood.

  At the end of the summer, Ilan and I are offered permanent jobs at the magazine, and we accept them. His father sees no problem with our deciding not to return to school. He did not attend college himself, he points out, yet he hires Ivy League graduates every year. The world itself will educate us, he tell us.

  And Ilan, I believe, will educate me too; I borrow his books and read them methodically. I even read books from his childhood that he has by now forgotten, trying to intuit how they shaped him, made him the person I love and not some other person.

  My mother voices her unhappiness, but I don’t listen. As a result, she begins to concentrate even more on her other daughters: one a freshman at Yale, one applying to college, one soon to apply. All three are like Goldilocks; all of life, for each, is Just Right.

  At the magazine, I begin to profile celebrities. I have a neat, meticulous approach to my job. My mother, if she knew how I worked, would be proud.

  First I collect all the past coverage, all the major articles. In each, I underline in Hi-Liter any quote or fact that seems off base. Then I read the highlighted material over and over, until I have an image of the celebrity different from what the public sees, a sort of shadow image made up of all the small, disconcerting details and comments that have slipped through.

  I try to hold that image in my mind, and during the interview, it is that person to whom I believe I speak.

  I want the interviews to be like small traps into which the subject steps unknowing, so I concentrate on minutiae about which the celebrity has never been closely questioned. I ask about acquaintances, not friends; about an uncharacteristic dress, or an object that does not fit with the others in the celebrity’s house. Or I ask three different variants of a single, crucial question, peppering them through the interview. In this way, I sometimes get the truth.

  I use this method because I believe people betray themselves. My method leads to strange interviews. At best they are unusual, revealing. I press upon lives to try to find out where their stress fractures are. Perhaps, unconsciously, I already intuit the invisible fractures in my own.

  The next summer, we rent a house upstate. It is small and white, with a lawn of reeds that ripple like water when the wind blows.

  There, we separate during the day and write, then reconvene in the evening for dinner. Everything seems easy and slow. I stop smoking, doing so easily and without struggle. I surprise myself because I find I can wish away my need after all – the same need that persists in Ilan whenever he tries to quit.

  During the warm nights, the overhead spinning fan clicks as its blades turn – it rocks in its socket as it cools us – and a second fan, which we place in the front window, blows over our bodies as we sleep.

  We keep the ancient black-and-white TV the owners leave, so every movie we rent is black-and-white for us. We freeze Coca-Cola into Popsicles and pry them from their cold-sticky metal trays. Exploring the attic, we flush out birds and even bats, watching them screech and wing away.

  We live in the past; we live alone. We live in the perfect quiet of our thoughts, our work, and the love that for each of us is ultimate, definitive. We are in our early twenties; yet perhaps we are already there.

  * * *

  On the 4th of July, we drive to Ilan’s father’s summer place in East Hampton. Ilan has traveled into the city the previous day to buy fireworks illegally in Chinatown. Now, on the expanse of his father’s dark lawn, they twist and hiss and sputter before us in throes of light.

  Two of Ilan’s cousins are there for the holiday, twin girls who are eight years old. I can tell Ilan prefers the quieter of the two – the one who reads a book and hangs back – and has no time for her aggressive twin. The one he chooses is the little girl I was.

  She burns herself with her sparkler. It confirms for her, I think, that she should stay inside with her books. She runs crying into the house. Her sister stays on the lawn outside, waving her sparkler overhead – crowned by its short lines of white, perpendicular light.

  Inside the house, the girl Ilan prefers has a fresh red burn on her hand. He opens her small hand to run it under water.

  ‘It’s going to be all better,’ he tells her. ‘Count aloud with me, and each number is going to make it better.’

  She starts counting, and by the time she is at seven, she has stopped crying and he’s drying off her hand.

  Then Ilan sits with her on the staircase and talks to her about her book. Their conversation is quick magic; he challenges her, takes her seriously.

  ‘Why is she your favorite character?’ I listen to him ask the girl intently, and I hear her quietly explain.

  It is that day that I understand that as young as I was when we met, as young as I still am, this is not a passing romance: it is the love I will have, the love I’ll choose. I believe, as I watch them, that the little girl will remember the conversation always – literally remember only the sparkle and the burn, but also intimate a conversation she cannot quite recall. Her cousin said something important; it is not recoverable; she tries to remember it but she cannot.

  Ilan, I almost believe you came to me that way in childhood – sat with me after fireworks until I fell asleep, and then disappeared. I almost believe you chose me and changed me long ago, spoke to me and convinced me of
something that went deep but that I immediately forgot. But then I remember it is only a dream of mine. You did not come to me then, and your appearance in my life later was not a magical thing, even if it has felt that way to me at times.

  Shall I say those months, those years, that we were happy? I am not sure what that means. At the time I believed we were, but looking back I am no longer so certain.

  It is a month later, in mid-August, when I find Ilan with the other woman, when I watch them through the window. It is then that I discover my life is very different from the life I imagined it to be, and our happiness is not as pure as it appears.

  ‘I’m not going to leave,’ I tell Ilan, on the night I allow him to return to the loft. It is the middle of August, a week after I found him with the woman, after I watched them through the window. It has been a week of his messages, and of my silence.

  ‘I won’t even ask you to be faithful,’ I announce. ‘You can be with other women.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ he asks, but he is not really asking. He pushes down the pockets of his hooded sweatshirt and looks at me, assessing me to see if I am serious. He sits down next to me on the couch.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  He nods. I think it long ago clicked with him that this was the only way for us to live. He had been waiting, hoping I would reach the same conclusion.

  ‘You have to promise you’ll always tell me the truth,’ I warn him. ‘There can’t be anything I don’t know about.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And I have to always be there.’

  He blanches, looks at me astonished. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s the only way. Otherwise I’ll always think you’re falling in love with someone else.’

  I’ve thought about this a long time, and I have tried to be as severe with myself as I can, to find out if I really will be able to bear it. It is as I told him: I can’t see another way. I know it is not in him to be faithful. I believe I can live with this bargain. And privately, I have to confess to myself that there is even a little allure mixed in with the pain I know I can expect. A darker life, I have begun to hope, can have its pleasures too.

  ‘Fine, I agree,’ he says. He thinks for a moment, and then he looks at me almost quizzically, hopeful the way a child is hopeful, and he goes down on one knee, next to the couch, and produces a ring.

  He is tall enough that even kneeling, he is still large to me, but more vulnerable. I can see close up the sharp, white part that divides his soft, dark hair.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asks.

  ‘No. Not this way.’

  ‘Maya, you just explained, this is the only way it can be. And you’re right. Don’t you love me?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Then marry me. The only obstacle is gone. You took it away. Please, marry me.’

  ‘All right,’ I say quietly. It is a flaw in me; I love that surrendering moment.

  The diamond is so big it is embarrassing, and I make Ilan exchange it for a smaller one. He tells me with glee, though, that the new, smaller diamond is more precious: a yellow diamond, particularly rare and costly. It seems strangely ugly to me – tainted or aged. But I am too tired to argue, to tell him to take it back again. This time, I just tell him it’s beautiful.

  And so it is that we are to be married in splendor. The wedding, we decide, will take place the following spring. Ilan promises I can count on his fidelity until then; the bargain between us won’t take effect until we actually marry. Meanwhile, he devotes himself to planning.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ I tell Ilan as he orders tablefuls of orchids, as he selects the violinists who will rove the reception. ‘I feel like you’re trying to make it up to me. Aren’t my parents supposed to pay?’

  ‘I love you, and I can easily afford this. I want you to have a beautiful wedding.’

  His eyes shine. It strikes me: he had not thought he could ever marry.

  I have faith in him – there, I’ve said it. I believe in him. Even if it makes me a fool to do so, I am willing to be a fool.

  How is it that faith can be explained, the feeling of it? You fall asleep in a room with a window on the sea. When you wake – having slept deeply, undisturbed – you cannot know, but you still feel, that the sea continued all night. You can almost hear all the hours when it lapped at the shore as you slept; that is how strongly you believe in the sea, how deeply the waves’ sound convinced you. You believe the sea waited for you as you slept, like a lover who stays up breathing beside you, watching you through the night.

  Although I know it may be impossible, given the bargain I’ve made, it is only a few days after we get engaged that I start to daydream of having a child. All my life I’ve dreamed of impossible things – another family, another self – and this, it turns out, is no different.

  Growing up, I never thought I would want a child. But when I was eighteen I changed my mind. It happened when one of my half sisters gave birth secretly, during her sophomore year of high school – one of the perfect daughters not so perfect after all.

  I was a freshman in college, home for a vacation during the year before I met Ilan, when I still hung around my family like an uneasy ghost. I was brought along to the birth because my mother wanted me to drive – she and my sister would ride in the backseat, she told me, and I would drive them home when it was all over.

  I remember that my mother held my sister’s hand as she went into labor, and in her other hand, my sister held a push button by which she could control the amount of painkiller, within limits the doctor had set. The button seemed to comfort her; she adjusted it by tiny amounts as if to convince herself the drug was still there if she needed it.

  After many hours of labor, she was told she would have to have a C-section. The operation startled me – her body cut open brutally, stomach muscles sliced through; the womb lifted out so the surgeon could cut into the sac. Pearly and white, a perfect space capsule, it was sliced open and then fell away, the small astronaut revealed.

  If my half sister had seen the child, I think, she would never have given it away. And I did see the child, yet I let it all go forward: in minutes the tiny infant was handed irrevocably into strangers’ arms.

  I know the girl will imagine, as she grows up, how it must have been – think of her lost mother, the woman with the scar on her stomach through which she once emerged into the light. I would like to find the girl, to tell her what she looked like, wrinkled, her face crumpled, but beautiful nonetheless, as she was lifted up – as she cried, bloody, and was not handed to her mother. But I cannot; with the adoption, even my sister was legally barred from her, and I, of course, have no claim on her at all.

  It’s hard to explain how it happened, but seeing the child’s birth changed me almost by happenstance, the way a stranger’s casual comment can reveal you. Ever since, I’ve wanted a child of my own, perhaps to make up for the one I lost that day – a child that was not mine, and yet was mine somehow. When I met Ilan, I knew he would be the one to give her back to me; the child I would someday have would be his.

  A few weeks after we become engaged, Ilan says, ‘I want to show you something,’ He leads me into our bedroom.

  On the bed, a white wedding dress lies. The bodice is silk; the skirt, minutely beaded, is so voluminous it covers half the duvet.

  ‘I love it,’ I say.

  ‘It was my mother’s. My father gave it to me to give to you.’

  ‘It’s very nice of him.’ I try to sound enthusiastic, but I am worried. It seems tiny, not quite my size.

  ‘It shows how much he likes you. As soon as I told him we were engaged, he said, “That’s the girl for you.” Will you try it on?’

  I slip off my sundress and step into the wedding dress’s skirt, carefully pulling it up to my waist. The length is right; the lush fabric of the skirt surrounds me and skims the floor. My sandals disappear underneath. I look down and imagine myself the ballerina on the music box, the bride on the wedding ca
ke.

  ‘Can you zip me?’ I ask as I draw the thin white straps of the dress’s corset up over my shoulders.

  He pulls the zipper up, but it catches. I suck in my stomach. In fits and starts, he wrenches it closed. My breasts fit the décolletage but my stomach buckles the thin silk; the tight dress creates a roll of fat at my waist.

  ‘So you’ll lose a little weight,’ Ilan remarks.

  ‘This weight I can’t lose. I’ve tried for years. Couldn’t we have it altered?’

  ‘Come on, Maya, it’s just five pounds.’

  ‘Look, will you unzip me? I can’t breathe.’ But he doesn’t, still appraising my body in the dress.

  ‘We can get a different one,’ he offers.

  ‘I’d like to wear it if I can.’

  ‘But you say it’s impossible.’

  ‘I’ll try again. Maybe I can lose it. Can you please unzip me?’

  Finally he does.

  In the weeks that follow, I try so hard to flatten my stomach, but I can’t. Despite dieting, despite an obsessive regimen of yoga and sit-ups, the fat remains. My arms shrink, and my face narrows so my cheekbones rise out of it. Even my back gets thinner, my spine’s nubby bones more prominent – but the fat around my waist is undiminished by an ounce.

  I decide to resort to plastic surgery. I call a doctor the magazine recently touted, and learn I can afford it. It will cost almost exactly what I am due to be paid by the magazine for an interview with a celebrity couple who have moved together to Siberia – literally, Siberia.

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ Ilan remarks when I tell him.

  ‘I want to,’ I reply. ‘It’s harmless and I can afford it. So I’m going to.’

  On my first visit, the doctor takes ‘before’ photographs in front of a black curtain. He is silver-haired but young-looking and very handsome. I stand before him wearing thin paper panties he provides, and for a moment he could be a pornographer. The click of the flash arouses me.