3

by Julie Hilden

  This is when the turn happens, the change. I remember the precise day it occurred.

  One Saturday in April, only a few weeks before our first wedding anniversary, I watch Ilan interview a new woman – her name is Jennifer – at the Frick. The museum has few visitors during the day, so it is easy for Ilan to talk privately to her there – and easy for him to position her near a doorway so I can overhear. I think he enjoys the idea of a seduction among works of art, as if he could as easily take home the porcelain-skinned beauty in an Ingres painting as the real woman he slowly seduces in front of it.

  Jennifer gesticulates a lot, and laughs too loudly for the hushed atmosphere of the museum. She is busty, blowsy, slightly crass, overly tanned.

  I tell Ilan, after we’ve returned home, ‘I don’t like her, I think she’s fake.’

  ‘I think you’d like her if you met her, actually,’ he says. ‘You have a lot in common.’ He pauses. ‘I really want this one.’

  ‘Well, I really don’t.’ I am surprised he is arguing with me; I have turned down a number of women before, and he has always been apologetic about having even suggested them.

  ‘I met her,’ he objects. ‘You didn’t. You only saw her from far away. So you have to trust me on this one.’

  He comes up behind me, places his hands on my breasts. I am immediately aroused. The more we are with other women, the more insatiable I am to be with him alone. But I push him away.

  ‘You said I could choose them. I’m choosing. I don’t want her.’

  ‘Do it for me,’ he pleads.

  ‘I do this all for you. This one thing, I don’t want to do. You’re asking me to have sex with her, and I don’t even want to touch her. She repels me.’

  ‘You don’t have to touch her.’ He raises his eyebrows, and I feel myself losing again. I know I will do whatever he asks – indeed, I will love doing it; it will be, in the end, as if I had chosen it.

  ‘If I don’t have to touch her,’ I tell him, ‘maybe it’s okay.’

  The day Ilan has arranged for us to meet Jennifer, I am dressed in a white satin slip, and he blindfolds me. He ties me to a chair in the writing room, with the three silk cords pulled tight around my hands. Then he takes the wedding ring from my finger – the first time since we married that I have not worn it. He leaves to pick her up and bring her here. Silently I wait for them.

  As they step inside the apartment, her trill of a laugh grates. When they enter the writing room, she gets quiet, and whispers, ‘Is that her?’ – as if I am damaged somehow, or sick – and it is as if I hear his nod, and then her smile.

  ‘Do you think she’s pretty?’ he asks.

  ‘Sort of. Not so pretty. Why did you tie her up?’

  ‘Because I wanted to. She lets me do what I want. Are you going to be that easy?’

  ‘Easier,’ she promises.

  They move to the bed and I hear the labored breathing that I imagine they themselves, inside their arousal, are unaware of. They kiss and kiss, almost inaudibly – each kiss silent until the small slide and suck of its ending.

  I hear her small kitten cries as he touches her. I can tell he wants to moan back, but he suppresses it. He won’t go to that level of insult, won’t be quite free with her in front of me yet.

  Hearing her cries, I move through a tremendous rage like a pulsing light – vast and murderous, and it would be a blinding rage if I were not already blindfolded in this perfect dark.

  Suddenly she is quiet again. ‘Wait a minute,’ she says to him.

  I hear her walk over to me. Then I feel her finger as it draws a line under my nipples, through the thin satin.

  ‘Too bad for you, whatever your name is,’ she says. ‘I have a husband at home and now I have a lover, too. But you, you have nothing. I feel sorry for you.’

  She says it with such satisfaction, and Ilan does not contradict her.

  ‘Hey, come back here,’ he says to her lazily.

  I hear her walk back to the bed, and then I know from the satisfied noises she makes that he is touching her. In a few moments I realize with a pang that he has gotten inside her without my knowing it. He is inside her now.

  Soon I hear her come to orgasm, loud but still kittenish, and very obviously satisfied. She is quite an actress; I can tell by her cries that she enjoys that I hear them.

  Perhaps twenty minutes later – after a whispered conversation I cannot quite make out – they begin again. By now, the rage in me has started to evaporate until I am calmer, I am someplace else. Again I am the quietest girl, the stillest waiter: my most basic self.

  I feel myself slowly becoming as wet as I was angry. I move through jealousy into some deeper feeling. My pain, in the end, excites me even as I suffer it. Ilan must have known, when he planned this, that it would be this way.

  She’s on her knees for him now, I can tell, and he is inside her, thrusting from behind. She gives a low moan every time he moves into her, hard and unchecked. Her calls rise in a false crescendo – still a display for my benefit – until again she climaxes, or pretends to.

  A long moment passes. Ilan unbinds me and takes the blindfold off. I blink even though the lights are dim.

  Jennifer is lying back on the bed, chest heaving, winded. On her nipples are Ilan’s wedding ring and mine. Her left nipple swells around my smaller ring but Ilan’s rests securely on her right nipple, as if it had been made to fit there.

  Her breasts are fantastic, full and lovely and slightly tan, and I can almost see them in the way I know Ilan did. I know how he must have felt as he slipped the rings on, as he screwed my ring slightly tighter over her nipple.

  Now Ilan walks over to Jennifer, slips the rings off, and pockets them. We have married her, I think. We married this.

  ‘You can go now,’ Ilan tells her.

  ‘That wasn’t what we discussed,’ she says.

  ‘Are you listening? I’m telling you to leave.’

  ‘It’s demeaning for you to just fuck me and dismiss me. This was supposed to be foreplay. It was supposed to be a threesome. I want her’ – she points at me – ‘not just you.’

  ‘I’m telling you to leave. There’s nothing here for you now. Bye, Jenny. Good night.’

  ‘Good night,’ I repeat after him quietly.

  Jennifer dresses sullenly. As she steps into her high heels, I think of that first angry girl at the summerhouse, indignant, leaving. I want the toss of the head that would shake her breasts a little, but it never comes.

  She shrugs on her coat without Ilan there to hold it for her. He has by then gotten on the bed with me, and he is occupied in trying to convince me with his touch that the place in which we will end up, after all this, is worth all that we have done, and all that we have lost, to get there.

  Ilan caresses me over and over, running his hands gently along my back, moving his fingers tenderly over the edges of my face. Jennifer’s departure is announced by a slamming door. He slips my ring back on my finger, and offers me his, but I don’t accept it.

  ‘Do I take you? I do,’ he says. ‘I still do. Do you take me?’

  I say nothing. I want to say no. After a moment, he slips the ring on his own finger.

  ‘Cry, then,’ he orders me, annoyed. ‘I know you want to.’

  I start to cry.

  The next afternoon I am trying to write up another interview at the apartment. Again I feel confident it will be a cover story, especially since I believe that Mr Resnick, like Ilan, must know of the offers that have come in, attempting to lure me away. But I can’t work, I can’t write it; I am in pain.

  I play with my wedding ring, which I had put back on but now remove again, working it past my fingertip and then holding it in my palm. Eventually I slip it back into place and resume typing, but it still bothers me. Loose on my finger – it was never properly fitted for me – it moves up and down slightly as my hands move, traversing the span between my knuckle and the end of my fingers’ fork: that small space within which it can wander, but
which it can never leave.

  The princess in her locked castle, I think to myself bitterly, enchanted by the golden ring she must always wear.

  It does not help my mood that the celebrity about whom I am writing left her husband because he cheated on her. I know her type: she is that admirable kind of woman who deserves better and is well aware of it. Indeed, she is already dating someone else, a younger musician who is crazy about her, she says. I noticed, when she gave me a tour of her house, that he had left no clothing in her closets, and her toothbrush still leaned solo in its holder. But I also knew that if he didn’t move in eventually, she would leave him, too.

  Who are these women, I wonder, and what is the source of their confidence? How is it that they can leave?

  Unable to write a word more, I languish on an upholstered chair, cradling my laptop.

  Near me Ilan is busily typing away, bent over his own laptop, which sits on the wooden desk where he works. I believe his writing – he is working, finally, on one of his own articles – is a peace offering of sorts, an admission that he hurt me on the night with Jennifer, that he has burdened me too heavily by asking me to write all his pieces, as well as my own. But it feels like too little, too late.

  I imagine leaving him but immediately I am flooded with sadness; I understand just how hard it would be, how painful to bear. I imagine handing him a plate of fishhooks with my blood on them – a silver platter of bloody metal and caught on it, scraps of ripped-up skin. I imagine saying to him, ‘Here, I’ve finally torn you out.’ Saying: ‘I’m willing to bleed to leave you. It is right, finally, that I leave you.’

  ‘Can we please stop?’ I ask him. I blurt it out. I wanted never to challenge him. But I can’t help it.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘You know what.’

  ‘I thought we talked about this a long time ago. We went through this. We decided it together.’

  ‘But I didn’t think it would be like this. I feel like I’m losing myself. Like I don’t even have a self, I just do what you tell me.’

  ‘Which excites you.’ He raises his eyebrows at me, smug.

  ‘We shouldn’t have done the thing with Jennifer. You shouldn’t have made me do it.’

  ‘You seemed to like it at the time. I see you with these women, Maya. You pretend it’s for me but I know you like it. It makes me jealous how much you like it, but I still let you do it. Isn’t it exciting, to have new desires – to change? That’s why we’re alive, isn’t it?’

  He kicks his feet up on the table and leans back casually as he quizzes me.

  ‘I tried to change.’ he tells me, ‘and I couldn’t – I’m not as lucky as you. You’re the one who turned into the famous writer. I’m still toiling here. You’re the one who learned that you like women – that you love them. I’m the known quantity, Maya, and you’re the one who’s interesting. Let me show you who you are. Experiment with me a little. I want to try something else with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘I trusted you before and you brought home a woman I hated.’

  ‘And you loved it when I fucked her. You wanted her too, didn’t you? Admit it: if I left you, you could be with a woman just as easily as a man.’

  ‘Are you going to leave me?’

  ‘No, I’m not. But you know what? If I did, you wouldn’t see it coming. You just have to trust me. You’ll be a lot happier when you learn you can’t control your whole life the way you want to.’

  ‘Only you can do that, right?’

  ‘I don’t control your life, Maya. Or if I do, you let me. If you hate it so much, why do you let it happen?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, you won’t know unless we do more. See if you like it, and if you don’t, we’ll stop. But before you try it, you can’t know.’

  ‘First tell me what it is.’

  ‘That’d spoil it. You’ll see. It won’t involve anyone else, just you and me. I’ll show you.’

  After our conversation, I am nervous for a while, wondering what is next. But then I begin to relax a little.

  For our first anniversary, Ilan gives me beautiful stationery with both of our initials on it, and I give him a rare edition of Lolita. We have a romantic dinner together, and he tells me he does want to have children with me someday – just not now.

  I am ebullient; I had feared he might never want to have children now, because it would break our bargain. It makes me think the bargain, too, might end someday – maybe even someday soon.

  Ilan has stopped looking over the responses to the ads, and is no longer scheduling meetings with other women. I begin to suspect he may not do anything new after all. Instead, we will simply be able to move on to a quieter phase of our life.

  During this time, I get a lot of writing done. My ability to write seems to ebb and flow in me like an instinct or drive. Sometimes I write quickly, as if in a fever. Other times, the words come to me more slowly and steadily, like drops from a dripping tap.

  On the days when the writing flows quickly enough to allay my anxiety, and Ilan is affectionate, I am almost happy. This time, he is the one helping me. When he reads my writing and edits it, his small corrections of my wording seem to echo the small corrections of my body that he makes during sex, as he shifts me, above or beneath him, to increase his pleasure.

  As the months pass, Ilan continues to be sweet to me – almost as sweet as I remember him being in college. He begins to bring me flowers every day – the ones I like best, Gerber daisies and white roses. I have been so long without them, I realize. And he rents another summerhouse – far from the one where I caught him cheating – so that we can have more peace and quiet to write.

  I begin to believe he is falling in love with me anew – and I begin to fall for him too, to feel just as I did when I was nineteen, standing in front of the library, and he startled me, and it all began.

  When we make love during this interim time, I fantasize that we are still in the innocent years before we married, before our bargain was made. I imagine us in a classroom, after Ilan has forced its lock; I feel us there against the hard table, breathing. I feel his weight on me and I love how it presses me down.

  Or I imagine that we are in the field near my mother and stepfather’s house that we once visited, long ago. The leaves crackle and crunch below us. Rolling on them, we reduce them to their netted, ghostly spines; shards of the leaves’ skin shift lower in the pile below us. Among the leaves, on the dry grass, I am wet and ardent; I am – or I once was – alive.

  I dream leaves into my hair. I dream him above me. I dream us, always, alone. I dream that love exists, that it can continue.

  My next interview, which happens in September, is for me the strangest of all. Again an actor asks me to his house. Again he is alone there, without publicist or assistant or photographer. But this time the reason is very different.

  The actor takes his shirt off casually, with his back turned toward me, as soon as I enter, and the sight is overwhelming: I have to close my mouth so as not to whimper with desire. I can’t think, and for a moment, I can’t hear. He speaks to me, but it is as if all the sound has been drawn from the room somehow.

  ‘What did you say?’ I breathe.

  He taunts me: ‘They say you know people better than they know themselves. But I know myself very well. So I wondered what you could possibly learn from me.’ He has a slight accent, Australian perhaps. I remember that he grew up there, but moved away when he was a child.

  I pause, dry-mouthed. He is the first man I have wanted since Ilan, and I am unaccustomed to it. He watches me, observant, uninvolved. He is more Ilan than Ilan is, I realize – lighter and less regretful, equally passionate and more headstrong. He is Ilan in a dream, in another life, in a fairy tale in which his soul is sweeter and his face more angular, as if he had been formed to be a tempter none could resist. Though I have met, in my interviews, many beautiful men and women, there have been none as beauti
ful as this.

  ‘Come sit on the couch with me,’ he invites. ‘Try your best. See what you can get from me.’

  I do. And strangely, though he has insisted he will never reveal himself, he does.

  When I write up the interview later, I explain how much he misses his estranged daughter – although he mentions her name only once, I still can sense the longing, the crack by which his heart is riven, his loneliness.

  ‘How is your daughter?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, Stacey,’ he laughs. ‘She’s growing up, doing fine.’

  A single mention, the way his voice varies just slightly when he says her name, gives him away.

  I observe his bored game-playing, sense his indifference to the arousal he invokes in women – in me. All he has in his life is sexuality, as easily as sunlight it comes to him. It means little.

  He is getting older, in his forties now; his daughter is only five. She has a life in another country that goes on without him, and as each day passes, it is a lost day to him, whatever vanities he may have filled it with. The only woman he wants, he cannot have brought to him. And so he has brought me here, to carry a message to her, whether he is aware of it or not.

  There are no framed pictures of her on his mantels, no photo albums on his shelves. But I know about hiding photographs – and so I look for the places where the photographs should rest, and do not. I can almost see them in their drawers: the girl in her swing, the girl on his shoulders.

  When the interview appears, a month later, the actor calls me up crying. He tells me his ex-wife has finally brought his daughter to visit, after she read the article.

  Now, he says, he sees I was right: his daughter was the reason he called me up, invited me over, though he did not know it himself, at the time. And, he says, he would like to see me again.

  I do not go to see him. But I do allow myself a small infidelity: I keep his cell phone number in case I need to call it someday. And someday, much later, I do call.

  The day after the telephone call, with the actor still on my mind – the way his shoulder muscles had tensed in the day’s failing light; the sound of his crying, the way it broke up his words on the phone – I am distracted, not entirely present.