3

by Julie Hilden

  ‘Did anything unusual happen?’ Ilan asks. ‘You seem different. You’ve seemed different ever since that interview.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ I reply.

  ‘I think it did.’

  ‘You’re crazy, then. What do you think happened?’

  ‘I don’t know – something. The actor made a pass at you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Right, this famous actor made a pass at his married interviewer.’

  ‘Dismiss me all you want,’ he says. ‘I know something happened. Look at you. You’re glowing – it’s disgusting.’

  And despite myself, I blush.

  I have broken the spell – or his jealousy has. Afterward, Ilan begins to carp at me again – asking me to revise one of his articles over and over, telling me it is not good enough yet, pushing me even though he knows I have a drop-dead date of my own, when I must turn in my interview, coming up very soon.

  I almost think he is purposely trying to trip me up at times – to force me to weaken my articles suicidally, so that even his father will not run them; to tempt me to squander my small success. But it doesn’t work: I’ll stay up all night if I have to, work every waking hour if I must, until the moment I finally email the piece to the office for my editor to review.

  I begin to long for that moment, as if the email were not only a communication with my editor, but also a strange communication to some other self of mine, the self in me that is a writer at the core, saying, ‘All is well, we are alive, I have found you, you are hearing from me again.’

  The next interview is done on schedule, despite Ilan’s sabotage, and I gain the next cover, and I know then with certainty that I can live if I leave.

  Enough calls are coming in, enough offers to sustain me. In my own small world, I am solidly famous: my name is a brand, standing in for the secrets I have been told, the secrets I am now supposed to have an almost magical ability to elicit.

  The college dropout, the least-loved child, the sulky and radically introverted girl – all these are myself, but there is another, shadow self, too, that I might yet become: an influential journalist, someone with power. Someone who can say, like Ilan’s father, that she hires college graduates even though she never became one.

  There is a possible transformation that is inside me, yet to occur: another person I could be, when I thought I could be only this one. And I would make the transformation, I would claim this other self, if it were not for this love – the love that became my life, that replaced it. I still love Ilan, even though I know I should not; he is still at the center of me.

  Soon the first snowfalls of the winter arrive. We stay inside more and more frequently, in the comfort of the loft, with the heat on high. As we spend long days inside, Ilan’s bad mood only worsens.

  At the corners of each of the apartment’s huge windows, ice crystals collect and build. I fantasize that someday the crystals will converge on the centers of the panes, and our view will disappear entirely – the small spots of remaining light blinking out all at once: a row of television screens darkening in slow motion into pinpoints, or perhaps the surfaces of a series of ponds, with their softish ice freezing solid above me.

  Across the street, on the white vista of the playground, with their wary young mothers on the sidelines, children play in snowsuits. I look at them with a jealous hopelessness, as if they were unapproachably far away, playing instead in space suits on the moon.

  Finally, the day comes when Ilan chooses to start his next experiment, to begin to teach me what he’d like me to learn.

  I go to bed first, while he is still working at his desk. I’m curled up beneath a thin white sheet when he finally comes to me.

  First he blindfolds me from behind. Then he lays cold metal on the side of my neck, tilts it so that it touches me. In the overheated loft, it is a relief against my skin, like the curved side of a cold glass of water touching it. It lies against me like a heavy necklace, clammy. I shiver. I feel its contours against my skin, its lines, and I realize it is – it must be – a gun.

  ‘I’m your murderer,’ he says. ‘Lie still.’

  Ilan knows about the actor, I can tell – knows I was drawn to someone else. And he knows, too, that I forgot about him for hours, that it was as if he did not exist, and he cannot bear it. He senses the threat, and this is the threat with which he has chosen to meet it.

  He puts the gun in my mouth, lays it between my breasts. Then he eases it inside me. He moves it too slowly to hurt me, waiting endlessly for me to open around it.

  He says, ‘I am your rapist.’

  ‘You’re my husband,’ I tell him, but he doesn’t answer.

  He pushes the gun inside me and makes me come – come so hard that I cry and cry. And then he comes without my even touching him, merely from the thrill of using it on me, simply from that.

  The next day, I feel appalled at myself, dirtied by the game. Wanting to be alone, I leave the house long before Ilan awakens, and take the subway uptown to the Museum of Natural History.

  The butterfly exhibit is long gone, I know, but I remember it clearly. I begin to fantasize about thousands of butterflies landing on me and together lifting me – the infinitesimal flutter of each of their wings amounting to a great soft upward rush of wind, as they bear me up. But then I know they would not come to me that way, not after all that has happened.

  Instead I would find them clotting my mouth, my throat, my ears, my eyes. The collection of their small, petal-like softnesses would mean not grace, but suffocation. And it is a place deep within the ground to which they would bring me. Still, is it not a beautiful way to die?

  I stand in line for a ticket, tall among a group of children on a school trip – boys who are, perhaps, young versions of Ilan; girls who are our lost daughters. Once inside the museum, I crouch to read the explications of dinosaur bones that are written for children and posted on knee-high plastic plates mounted on pivots.

  I last about an hour at the museum – craning at the biggest skeletons, thinking about how all we get of the dinosaurs are their bones, and only fragments of those. What of their lives: the secret lives, unchronicled, lost forever?

  I like the way that simply looking at the bones makes me feel empty – as if in looking I become blank. Nothing can be expected from me here. It is reassuring. It is only I who have expectations, of what I will see and learn, and they are very modest. A small diversion is enough, anything to take me outside of my mind a little, outside of this sadness.

  I do not ask much. And what I ask I receive: I am empty here; I am no one. That is exactly what I want to be now – the white screen, the face without features.

  By the end of my time at the museum, though I have not consciously thought about it, I have my answer: I am not going to leave Ilan. Not now. I might someday be able to leave, but for now I will not.

  Ilan makes me come with the gun every night for a time. I never see the gun, black or silver; I never ask to see it. I am always blindfolded; it is just a cold touch to me. He uses it until he becomes inured to it, until finally even that thrill has worn off.

  After that there are other nights, there is a razor blade. Ilan has a steady hand with it. He watches me first, cutting, and then he puts his hand over mine to follow my hand, to learn my touch – just as he learned years ago to touch me the way I touched myself so I could come. I remember his larger body on mine, then; his larger hand on mine, then and now. Always the encompassing flesh, powerful and comforting. I like that he is larger. I want him to show me how.

  I know all about those girls who cut themselves, the so-called delicate cutters and the red script the blade draws on their skin. I know how they skirt the veins that lie underneath like gray-blue rivers with tributaries that fade to nothing.

  About a year ago, I interviewed a young actress and model who had once been such a girl, and who now had been told by her agent that it was a good idea, careerwise, to discuss it. And so she showed me her scars.

  She had cut th
em below her bikini line so she could still model. I still remember her white, perfect skin and the way, when she pushed her jeans down for me, the scars of the blade’s scratches showed beneath. I remember how I blushed, looking at them, and how, looking at me, she blushed too, suddenly embarrassed.

  I know about those girls, but this was a little more than that. A little deeper than a scratch, with a little more pressure, bringing a trace of blood from the skin. And a little harsher than would quite be delicate, a little harder than the press a girl might exert in her pink bedroom, alone among her teddy bears. I do not scratch, but write in blood: the paper my own skin; the ending, perhaps, my own death.

  Ilan warns me it is dangerous – we should avoid the veins, the ones near my wrists, he cautions, cut a little to the side of them, and he is careful that way. But still, the feel of his cut is harsh.

  Harsh enough, indeed, that my skin remembers it. I had – I have – scars, narrow lines that cut across each other, as if the tips of tree branches had come to life and scrabbled at me like thin fingers. Marks that seem to suggest that someone, or something, once tried to kill me, but ineffectually so.

  I know that something worse is coming, that it is coming soon, but I can only wonder what it may be. To avoid my anxiety, I begin to sleep a great deal. Ilan begins to be kind to me again, at least intermittently, and I take comfort in that, too, but mostly I sleep.

  I wake up early or stay up late only to catch a plane to an interview, or to meet a deadline. Otherwise, I sleep, whatever time of day it may be. Ilan catches me napping at two in the afternoon and finds it hard to awaken me even then.

  It’s funny, when I was a child I was afraid of going to sleep, because I thought someday I would never awaken. If my father could disappear from my mother’s house, I thought, perhaps I could too – spirited away one night, leaving just as my father left, without a bag packed or a good-bye.

  It had been a time of disappearances. To prevent my own, I used to read with a flashlight next to the warm cat sleeping beside me – staying up as late as possible, until I fell asleep without anticipating it, without having to fear it in advance. Now it is being awake that I fear more.

  My anxiety does not last very long, for soon I have my answer, I learn what can be worse. One night, Ilan tells me to wait for him – to wait in the shower so he can surprise me. Then he leaves the loft.

  I turn on the shower and run it cold, so that it keeps me alert. I know Ilan will come to me, and I know what he will do will be terrible, but still I am not afraid.

  I am waiting for the moment he alone can give me now – that moment of intense pain when it is as if I do not exist, that simple oblivion; the moment I know is inevitable and that I almost enjoy, so closely do I now identify it with myself. When I wonder why I stay, it is to that moment I return: the moment of immolation and purity, of intense sadness and perfect loss.

  From the shower, I hear the door of the loft open. My back is turned as a hand reaches over my mouth. Water falls over me like a benediction. It takes a terrifying second for me to be sure it is Ilan, and not some other man he has chosen. But when I feel his touch again, I know.

  His left hand stays over my mouth, while his right moves across my stomach to hold me still, then slides downward so he can put a few fingers inside me – so eager, in this first moment, to begin.

  I bite the hand on my mouth. For realism, I draw blood. Ilan swears. Then he bends backward to raise my feet from the shower’s floor, to carry me in front of him. Soapy, I slip through his hands a little and he almost loses my body, almost drops me, but he regains his hold.

  As he pulls me from the shower, the point of my elbow hits the door’s edge and resonates with pain. The glass door rattles, but does not shatter. His bitten hand bleeds on the tiled floor.

  I fight, just as I am supposed to fight. I bite the hand across my mouth once again – although in some way, it feeds me. I am wild. I am, for a few moments, entirely unlike myself. I find that I like being able to fight until I am overtaken. It is like being able to scream in a car with the windows closed – your impulse muffled even as it is expressed.

  In the bedroom it takes all of Ilan’s strength to hold me down, and that is what I like the most, my inability to move. If my body can be stilled, perhaps then my thoughts, too, can be silenced. I hope he can put me back into the place of concentration I crave – the dream platform, elemental and white.

  He ties my hands apart, not together. He uses neckties, not his silken cords. From such details I can almost believe he is really the stranger he pretends to be.

  He likes blindfolding me; he doesn’t want me to watch him this time. I like it too; it clears my mind. I realize the many ways I can recognize him, after all; the ways I know he is not a stranger: the way he thrusts inside me; the slight, characteristic smell of his skin.

  With my vision darkened, I feel minutiae: the slight residue of the soap I had not yet quite washed off, as it dries into tiny flakes, the final drops of the coating of water that covered me as they evaporate. Then I feel nothing, and that is the best of all.

  But then the pain becomes so intense, it returns me to the world. Small clamps he places on my nipples hurt sharply. I cry out, as he has wanted me to, but he does not answer, nor does he free me.

  The line between the game and reality begins to blur: my cry, I realize, is real; I want him to release me. But it is impossible, I see that: I am full-service for him now, everything he’s ever wanted. I am no longer a woman, but a fantasy of one; for now, I am no longer his wife, and he is right: he is no longer my husband.

  I realize how fully I am demeaned, and I observe it all with as much detachment as an anthropologist might. Yet even in my remoteness, I begin to fear he will go further, and if he does, I’ll be helpless against him. My life is slipping out of my control so quickly that it frightens even me; I have invited chaos in, but now I am afraid.

  I feel Ilan straining not to get out of control, straining against the violence in him. I understand that once again I am close to extreme pain, even close to dying. And I know that I fear these consequences less than, by rights, I should. Who will save me, if not myself?

  In the end, though, he does stop; he does leave. Alone, I walk naked to the shower from which I was hauled. I step into it gingerly and feel the water – I run it hot now, so it almost scalds – spreading through my half-dried hair. I close my eyes to the water.

  For once, the image that comes before my mind is not of Ilan. It is an image of the actor, his back toward me, raising his shirt above his head – so casually yet with an impact he must know, must recognize, an impact as comfortable to him as skin. The image glows in my mind as my body aches, and it is to that image that I escape as the hot water trickles like blood through my sopping hair.

  ‘One more woman.’ Ilan comes to me and proposes it the next morning. ‘One more time. And then it’ll all be over.’

  ‘It’s over now. It’s already gone too far.’ I can’t tell if he takes me seriously, if he knows how far in jeopardy our marriage is. As much as I love him, I have started to be able to imagine a different life.

  ‘Give me this last night,’ he pleads. ‘Then we’ll live like normal people. You want a child, don’t you? A little girl?’

  ‘You know I do.’ I think of the actor’s little girl, the visceral bond. Perhaps such a bond could save me. I would like to cry for someone beside myself, someday, as he did.

  ‘You can have her,’ Ilan assures me. ‘We can have lives like other people’s. You know, a happy family. We can be what other people think we are. I only want one more night, one more woman. I promise that will be it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘If I break my promise, you can leave me. I won’t stop you.’

  ‘You can’t stop me anyway.’

  ‘Yes I can,’ he tells me confidently. I know he’s right. I am lost without him, lost within myself. As much as I want to leave, I am still not ready.

 
‘Go ahead,’ I tell him. ‘You’re going to do it anyway.’

  ‘It’ll be the last time,’ he repeats.

  This time – the last time, or so Ilan claims – I am not blindfolded but gagged. He places the black gag over my mouth, ties it tight. For a few seconds, in panic, I breathe quickly through my nose, to confirm I can still breathe at all. But then I adjust, and relax my breathing.

  Once my panic has passed, Ilan undresses me meticulously, folding each piece of clothing as he takes it off. Then he ties me up on the bed, with the silk cords he likes to use.

  When he is finished, he ushers another woman into the bedroom. I have never seen her before. I don’t know when he chose her; I only know that he did so without my permission.

  Ilan undresses her in exactly the same way he undressed me: in the same order, with the same care. He folds her clothes in a single pile, next to mine.

  Then she gets on her hands and knees above me, naked as I am naked. He takes out a razor blade and puts it between her teeth. She closes her mouth on it obediently, calmly. They’ve discussed this before; she shows no hint of surprise, her face serene as a Madonna’s.

  The blade she holds in her teeth, she now presses to my throat. Her hair is dark. Close up, I see it is dark brown – not red. There is no red in it at all. And she weighs significantly more than 130 pounds, I can tell. Her breasts are heavy and full, and her round hips curve above mine.

  Lying below this stranger, with my hair spread out on the sheet below me, I can feel the merest touch of the blade on my neck, the slightest exertion of pressure. So far it is painless. Still, I begin to feel fear. Sweat seeps into my hair.

  I think of what Ilan said, about being careful not to cut my wrists too hard – how even a small push on the blade could, in a second, cut a vein. I think of the large veins near my throat, so easy to find, to sever. I imagine blood running down the side of my neck, like a pearl-bottomed drop of paint.

  The woman’s eyes are solemn and sad. The blade shines in her mouth. But she does not cut me with it; she just holds it there against my neck, still with only the slightest pressure. I can’t move, or I myself will inflict the cut. For minutes we are frozen there.