3

by Julie Hilden

  ‘Fuck you. I did everything you wanted,’ I say to him quietly, and I repeat his name until it is just syllables.

  I lay my head in his lap and cry. I kiss his face though it is covered with blood. I lick his eyelids as we have done in sex. It was so sexy to feel the jumpy eye move, unquiet, underneath its lid. Now the eye is still.

  When I draw back from him, I see that the blood on his face is interrupted. My tears have trickled down his cheeks as if they were his own. No tear streaks were there before, and I realize he must never have cried, not even when he began dying.

  I curl up in his arms for a moment, my head on his chest, but I can’t stay there. I crumple from the couch to the floor.

  I lie on my back, as if I am floating. I look for tiny calmnesses: the feel of my soles flat on the floor; the coldness of the wood on them, that slight gradient. I jam my nails into my palms the way I do at the dentist – to evoke the little, distracting pain that makes the larger pain slightly better.

  Sometime later, I call the police. I tell them, as if in a dream or a movie, that my husband is dead.

  Before the police come, I take from Ilan the chain with the metal hand, the one his grandmother gave him to protect him, and put it around my neck. When I move, the hand swings back and forth, clicking against my sternum – an erratic metronome.

  I think of how the silver hand has lain on his chest for so many years, beneath his sweaters and above his recalcitrant heart. I think of how it hung above other women when he was with them, and how in the same way it hung above me.

  I wear it now, I feel it against me – the fingers of the small metal hand trailing on my skin as if on the surface of water.

  * * *

  As I wait for the police, I decide I can’t bear to look at Ilan anymore. I stare instead at the Nike symbols in relief upon the floor.

  When the police finally arrive, officious and dripping with rain, they cordon off with yellow tape the couch on which Ilan’s body lies. Then they make me sit off to the side, in the untouched part of the apartment, which still looks just the same, like a showroom for life next to a showroom for death. I lean heavily against the back of my chair there, and watch them.

  There are two officers, one a detective. Stepping over the tape line, he begins, with gloves on, to examine Ilan’s cut wrists.

  ‘A suicide,’ he pronounces.

  ‘I could have stopped it,’ I say to myself quietly.

  ‘Many people feel that way,’ he tells me, overhearing. ‘Trust me, it’s not true.’

  Instead of answering him, I begin to cry – wildly, pathetically. I am without shame; I don’t care if the police hear. Let them hear me, I think: they are strangers.

  ‘You’re in shock,’ the detective informs me. ‘We need to take you somewhere where you can rest. Who can we call to come pick you up?’

  ‘No one.’ I can think of people who would come, even my parents, but no one I want to see now – only people whose presence would make me feel more alone. I know Ilan’s father has to be called, and it would be all right to have him here, but I would like to give him just a few more hours before the truth catches up with him, like an animal let loose to find him.

  ‘We need to take you to the hospital if there’s no one,’ the detective tells me. ‘We can’t let you stay here, not in the state you’re in. It’s the law.’

  ‘Fine,’ I reply. ‘Can I sleep there, at the hospital?’

  ‘Sure you can.’

  ‘Did you look for the note?’ I ask.

  ‘There doesn’t appear to be one.’

  ‘I’m certain he would have left one. He was a journalist, a writer.’

  ‘Ma’am, I’ve been searching around here pretty thoroughly,’ the second police officer interjects. ‘If there’d been a note, I would’ve found it. That desk is locked though’ – he points to the writing room – ‘so I’m going to force it, okay?’

  ‘No, don’t do that,’ I tell him. ‘It’s my desk, not his.’ But I lie. The locked desk is his. I lie because I would like to open it up by myself, in my own time. And if there is a note there, I would like to read it alone.

  ‘Sometimes people don’t leave a note, you know,’ the detective points out. ‘They’re not in a frame of mind to be able to.’

  I nod, but then I say again, stubbornly, ‘I know he would have left one.’

  The detective is gentle, and I don’t fight him. He escorts me to the hospital and has me check myself into the psych ward, where I sign a paper that says I cannot leave until they let me.

  At the hospital, I am put on suicide watch, in part because as soon as I change into my thin hospital gown, everyone can see the light scarring on my arms, the red line still healing on my neck – a second chain, like Ilan’s, that I can never take off.

  They give me sleeping pills but I don’t sleep. All night, a nurse watches in the darkness from a chair near the end of my bed, a sentinel.

  ‘I’m not going to kill myself,’ I tell her. ‘You don’t have to stay.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ she says. ‘If you relax, you’ll go right to sleep. You took enough medication to put a horse out.’

  ‘My husband died.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. My husband died too. Five years ago. A heart attack.’

  ‘I’m sorry too.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ she says. ‘He used to hit me. My life is much better now.’

  ‘Good,’ I tell her. ‘Good for you.’

  ‘Go to sleep,’ she repeats. ‘In the morning you’ll feel much better.’

  Finally I do fall asleep, calm among the cheap, clean sheets, overborne by the chemicals, my mind shut by my heavy eyelids’ weight.

  That night, I dream that I detach from the world and rise away from it, as invisible threads break soundlessly. My dream is a dream of flying, and then of a sudden fall.

  The next morning, another nurse wakes me, bringing me cereal that I eat but do not taste. She says people have arrived – my mother, Mr Resnick. But I tell her I don’t want visitors, and she nods. I want some quiet time here, time to think, to be alone.

  When she returns, to tell me that she has sent the visitors away and to give me the flowers they brought for me, she also gives me a tranquilizer.

  Hazy and almost hallucinating on the strong drugs I have been given, I begin to think about what happened with Ilan. I remember being with him for the first time in my narrow college bed, so many years ago, when my heart raced for him – I think of how pure the love between us had been, and how we tainted it.

  I admit to myself that all the experimentation with the women fascinated me as much as it hurt me – like an accident I was compelled to watch. It had the feeling of a car skidding on snow, the feeling of the inevitable.

  It was such a natural progression, what happened between us – yet at the same time, a lethal one. And I let it happen. After a while, I did not question whether Ilan could be better. I believed resolutely that he could not. And I gave permission for something he did not really want, not in the end. Permission that was, perhaps, a dare. I was the girl who handed him the cigarette and said, Go ahead and burn me.

  In the end, he had tried to change, and I think he was sincere in trying, but I did not believe in him, and he could not restrain himself. He would have killed me eventually: the cutting had started, it had continued, and I believed it would have completed itself somehow.

  He died for me – died so I wouldn’t have to. It is the only possible explanation for his suicide, at least for me.

  I was not the only one he slept with, far from it, but I was the only he would have died for. Next to that, what could a touch, a kiss, the temporary enmeshing of the flesh mean? How could it ever matter? He offered me his blood, his breath, his regular pulse, when he could just as easily have taken mine.

  That means he must have loved me – doesn’t it? My silent question hangs in the air.

  The psychiatrist who is assigned to me prescribes 20 milligrams of Prozac p
er day, and provides other medication to calm me until it begins to work. He offers me therapy as well, but I decline. Therapy cannot help me, I believe, since I will not feel comfortable enough to tell the truth even there. Ilan was the only one who knew the truth about us, and I do not want anyone else to learn it now.

  At night I grind my teeth – awakening each morning with a trickle of blood on my pillow, and a tiny cut in my mouth. The blood again: it sickens me. I imagine that my mouth is lined with blood; that if I am ever again aroused, my arousal will transpire only blood.

  Privately, I am still distraught, caught between escapist fantasies, the effects of strong drugs, and sheer grief. Around other people, however, I begin to be able to appear normal. My sense of shame returns, and I begin frequently to wear the single turtleneck I have brought, to cover up my scars, instead of the hospital gowns or the T-shirts I also brought.

  Eventually I am able to conduct conversations without crying, and even able to convince the psychiatrist I am improving dramatically.

  Finally, after about six weeks, I am released from the hospital, on the condition that I continue with the Prozac for a while. I promise that I will, and I do. As the weeks have passed, it has finally started to take effect. The drug cuts off the ‘down’ but I can still see it, as if I were walking on a pane of glass over a chasm.

  Even my tears have Prozac in them now, it occurs to me. At first, taking the drug felt like a huge capitulation, a loss of self, but then I remembered it was not such a great self anyway, all told. Very masochistic, in fact. I would like a new one. If I could wish away my heart, I would.

  When I get home to the loft, the day I am released, I am stunned by how different it looks. The first thing I think of is Ilan’s handprint: I want to see it again and I can’t. It’s gone forever, overpainted. All the blood is gone from the leather couch, too, but that can’t be. Is it a new couch?

  The floor, too, is clean, bare of blood. The loft is spotless. I know Ilan’s father must have had it cleaned, and I appreciate the gesture, but I am not yet ready to see it so pristine – as if Ilan had never died here. I miss the apartment the way it used to be, even the way it was when his body was here – as if it were an entirely separate place I can never visit now.

  Opening the closet we shared, I discover that all of Ilan’s clothes are gone. I find some of them hanging in a small closet near the back of the apartment. At least, I think, Mr Resnick was respectful enough not to dispose of them without asking me.

  As I enter the closet, I close the door behind me. In the darkness I draw Ilan’s clothes around me, like a child hiding. I can still smell, slightly, his cigarettes.

  With tears in my eyes, I begin to search among his clothes for the keys to his desk. In the pocket of one of his jackets, I find instead the blindfold and silk cords. I can barely stand to touch them. Finally, in an inside pocket of another jacket, I find the keys. I slip out of the closet, keys in hand, and open Ilan’s locked desk.

  Its top drawer holds a long, thin envelope. The rest of the desk’s contents are familiar: the metal box in which he kept the gun, his notes for stories, his drafts, his letters.

  I open the envelope, trembling. But there is no suicide note. Instead, the envelope turns out to be full of childhood photographs of me – ones I know I didn’t give Ilan. He must have stolen them from albums in my parents’ houses. I realize with a pang that my parents never noticed, and that Ilan must have known they never would.

  In one of the photos, I am painting at an easel, ten years old – unaware I am being photographed, inside that strict concentration I still retain. In another, I am eight years old, falling off my bicycle – caught in midair, when I am still absorbing the fact that I am falling, just in the moment before I begin to scream.

  It is a strange, mistaken snapshot; I was supposed to be photographed proudly riding my new bike. I don’t understand why my mother kept the photo, for her children always excel in everything they do. But I do understand why Ilan stole it: because I am so vulnerable there in the photo, about to be surprised by the hard contact of the pavement – vulnerable and open and astonished.

  The photos – there are ten of them in all – make me cry because they teach me, one by one, in a flash, what it was that Ilan loved in me, in what respects and with what limits. They show me the qualities that drew him: the preternatural focus, the dreaminess, the vulnerability and the pride, the wounds concealed.

  They show, more than anything, how before I met him, I was so profoundly apart. They show how far away I was when he found me, and over what a long distance I had to travel to come back, to come to him.

  The photos show me the way he saw me. And now they are the way I see myself. I will show yourself to you, that was his promise; I know you better than you know yourself. Even dead, he does make good.

  That first night at home, I let sleep take me very early in the evening. As I become drowsy, watching the light outside the windows fail and fade, it is as if I begin subtly to feel myself disappear.

  As I shimmer out, I begin almost to see you, Ilan; the dark bruise-like circles under your eyes start to resolve. I cannot help it: my heart races with a mere glance, just as it did when you lived. Burning, I rise in sleep, like a body jerked upward by invisible strings – as if in a moment I will levitate. Pleasure runs through me like a tremor, like a seizure, like faith.

  I cannot forgive myself for this, but equally I cannot resist it, and what harm can it do now? I dream of you, Ilan – dream as I have dreamed all my life of meeting you on a platform, empty and white, where we can tell each other the truth and the world is as I wanted it to be; where it is possible, as it never was in life, for me to love you without fearing you too.

  I dream of you, Ilan, and in a moment, I will see you. The darkness around me, unaccountably, is opening into a pure white.

  Ilan, I cannot wait until we can be alone.

  The next morning, I am awake for a few moments before I remember Ilan is dead – the dream was so real, it so convinced me, that for a time, even waking, I am caught in it.

  The memory comes to me like a strange and terrible sunrise, its light creeping inexorably across the floor toward me to illuminate my bed, my mind, my heart.

  Ilan’s father calls a few minutes after I have awakened.

  ‘The hospital told me I couldn’t visit, Maya,’ he says. ‘May I visit you now?’

  ‘Please,’ I say. ‘I’d like you to.’

  ‘If I’d known you were coming home, I would have been there to greet you. I just called the hospital and found out they’d released you yesterday. I’ll be right over.’

  I put on a turtleneck so Mr Resnick will not see the marks on my arms and throat. I realize I’ll always have to cover my scars like this now – perhaps even with a choker and bracelets, in the summer. It reminds me of an eerie fairy tale I read in childhood, of a girl who always wears a ribbon around her neck until on her deathbed, her husband unscrolls it, only to find her neck has been cut in two.

  When Mr Resnick arrives, he knocks hesitantly and politely waits for me to answer, though I know he has a key. He walks with a cane now, bent over as if Ilan’s death has been literally a blow to him. If I even stretched my still-healthy body in front of him, it would feel like mutiny. I stoop and shrink in his presence.

  He embraces me, but I find I don’t like touching him. He still looks too much as Ilan would have looked, if he had aged. He is still as rangy and narrow-hipped and unconventionally handsome as Ilan – even as he is also curled in on himself and brittle.

  I take his coat and the Russian hat he wears and hang them up. He sits down on the couch, painfully slowly.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asks. ‘You were in the hospital a long time.’

  ‘I’m okay. I can make it, I think.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ He pauses. ‘Did you see anything, Maya, in the days before?’

  ‘I wish I had but I didn’t.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Noth
ing.’

  I start to cry, from guilt and from wanting to tell him the truth, yet not being able to – and perhaps because he too has started crying; I can see the tears beginning at the corners of his eyes.

  ‘Mr Resnick,’ I say, ‘if I had seen anything – anything – I would have told you. Maybe he slept later. He might have been more distracted. Probably I should have known, but I didn’t, I didn’t see it.’

  ‘It’s not only you, Maya. I spoke to Ilan every day, saw him several times a week. I saw nothing. You know, he came by the day before it happened – to see his mother’s room, he said. At the time it didn’t strike me as unusual, he used to come there quite often when he was younger. Now I wish I’d asked him why. He must have been saying good-bye to her. Or saying he would join her. They were always so close, you know. I never could compete.’

  I twist my wedding ring on my finger, suddenly conscious of it. My impulse is to return it to Mr Resnick. It seems somehow that again it is his – or, more precisely, his wife’s. But I do nothing, for fear of offending him.

  ‘Do you know why he did it, Maya?’ he asks me.

  ‘I’m not sure, I think he was just depressed. I thought we had a good life. I was happy with him and I thought he was happy with me, but he must have been feeling a lot of pain I didn’t understand.’

  I don’t even sound convincing to myself. Mr Resnick only nods.

  ‘I was completely in love with Ilan,’ I add, glad to be able to tell at least one truth. ‘As much so as when we married. More so.’

  ‘I know you were. That’s what bothers me. He had love, he had what he wanted. I don’t understand, I can’t. To see his mother die from cancer, when she would have done anything to live even one more month, and then to do this.’

  ‘I don’t understand it either,’ I tell him. But I don’t think Mr Resnick believes me; he senses there is something I won’t disclose, but he is too discreet to press me further.

  He tells me that, as I assumed, he’s the one who had the apartment cleaned, and I thank him. ‘If you want, we’ll get you a new one,’ he says. ‘You just say the word.’