by Julie Hilden
‘Take off your pants. Now.’
I pull them down and step out of them. Despite myself, I am excited by her commands.
‘Your panties.’
I slip them off.
‘Your bra.’
And I am naked.
She takes three lengths of cord out of her pants pocket – the cords from your silk robe, she must have found them in the closet.
‘Tie up your legs. Now. One to each bedpost.’
She unnerves me, but I have not changed: I do what I am told, sexually. And I even strangely enjoy it, in the midst of my fear. Ilan, I have not been so aroused since you were alive.
I tie one leg to each corner of the metal frame at the foot of the bed, obediently pulling the cords tight. Once I am safely tied up, Olivia puts the gun on the side table, and with your black cloth, she blindfolds me. Then she takes the last of the cords and ties my hands to each other, and then to the bed frame – in the same style you preferred. She must have read my journals, after all.
I hear her unzip the pants she is wearing. And then it is you, Ilan, not her, whom I envision. With the blindfold on, I can finally see you. Rather than becoming you, as Olivia intends, she only gives you back to me. Meant to be an exorcism, it is instead a summoning.
I feel my mind opening to you, like a sleeping eye. The material of your pants moves, soft, against my thighs as you push inside me. I want to reach for your crisp white shirt the way I used to, so it buckles, starched, in my hands – to unbutton it so I can touch the smooth skin of your chest, its scattering of hair. I test my hands against their restraints but I can’t break free. I am so frustrated I want to cry.
I open my legs until the cords are tested. I want you inside me as deeply as is physically possible, and also more deeply than that. I enjoy your thrusting, Ilan. I moan with it. You alternate between cupping the entire breast firmly and pinching, with two fingers, each nipple – the way you used to. I squirm beneath you, the way I used to. It is all the same.
In minutes I climax, I feel you climax with me, and then I feel you go still and withdraw. Now that you are back, I wonder what it is you want from me.
Olivia pulls my blindfold off abruptly. She seems very angry; I think she senses how far away my thoughts have been. She slips the pants down, and there is the plastic, complete with veins and ridges, with the slight suture on the side like the seam on a Barbie doll’s foot; there is the harness, the harsh mesh of the straps. She rips the harness off, zips the pants closed.
It wasn’t you, after all, of course it wasn’t. And yet it was, I could swear it; I believe it.
The white shirt hangs loosely around her. She takes it off, and I see that beneath it she is still wearing your chain – its guiding, seductive, trailing hand.
She pulls on a fluorescent yellow T-shirt she has left here, and, one by one, she takes out the barrettes that hold her hair up – their layered green sequins orderly and strange as the scales on a mermaid’s tail. Then she pulls her hair down violently into its usual wash of red.
She sits on the bed besides me daintily, cross-legged – furious but femininely so. She no longer imitates you. But she makes no move to untie me and from this I see it is not over: not yet.
‘You read my journals,’ I accuse her. ‘You read them and then you followed them like a manual.’
‘I looked at one page, just like I said I did. I kept my promises to you, Maya, all of them. I love you.’
‘I love you too, but I can’t be with you. I have to have another life. I don’t like this, I don’t want it anymore.’
‘Really? For someone who didn’t want it, you seemed to enjoy it a lot. You want Ilan back, but when I give him back to you, you balk. Fuck you. I did everything you wanted. And you’re still going to leave me, aren’t you?’
‘I can’t let my life just replay itself like this.’
‘But it’s supposed to. Ilan said it would.’
‘What do you mean he said it would?’
‘He told me you’d fall in love with me. He said it would be hard at first, but I should be persistent. At first I was skeptical, but he showed me the photos, told me stories. I started to want you. I started to think about you all the time. I read all your articles.’
‘Did you know he was going to kill himself?’ I ask, horrified.
‘No, of course not, he said he was leaving you, that’s all. I wanted to be the woman – I wanted to be next. I even dyed my hair so I fit the ad. I used to be blonde. I gained a little weight too. It took a lot of peanut butter and ice cream.’ She giggles slightly.
I look at her red hair, garish against her yellow T-shirt, at the almost invisible line of blond at her part; I remember the bright red dress. And I think of the faint stretch marks on her breasts and thighs, marks of a time when she was thinner. I should have seen it; I don’t know how I did not.
‘You’re scaring me,’ I tell her.
‘You should be flattered. Ilan wanted someone else to love you, and he interviewed a lot of women, and he chose me.’
‘When you showed up on my doorstep, it was all an act?’
‘You were acting too, Maya. You wouldn’t even tell me he was dead, at first.’
‘You lied to me.’
‘So did you. We lied to each other, and we wanted each other. And we got each other. Don’t you see that that’s good? We could live happily ever after, if you would only let us,’ she pleads. ‘If you want me to be Ilan for you, I can do that. I’ve shown you I can. I can do it again. Let me show you.’
‘No,’ I tell her quietly. ‘I can’t, I don’t want it.’
‘That’s not the right answer,’ she replies calmly. I look into her eyes and see the shine of some drug there – in her inability fully to focus, her faraway look. It is as if she is trying to think, to reason out a difficult problem, her forehead wrinkled, her expression concerned. With her huge, dilated pupils, she moves in her own world, unfeeling – as if she could hum or whistle to herself as she decides what to do with me.
* * *
I begin to plead with Olivia, but she tells me to be quiet, and she puts the blindfold back on. Something terrible will happen now, I can feel it.
I think of screaming, but I realize it would do me no good. The street outside is deserted at this hour, and the double-paned glass of the closed windows is meant to block out sound; that was why Ilan’s father chose it. When the little girl’s cries in the playground disturbed me, I could simply close the window to silence them. My cries, too, will not be heard.
I hear the bed creak slightly as she settles down beside me.
‘Maya, do you like the razor blades best,’ she asks me, ‘or do you like this?’
She thrusts quick and cold and hard between my spread legs. I feel the gun inside me.
‘Please. You’re scaring me to death.’
‘That’s what you like, isn’t it? A little fear? Why don’t you come for me?’
She pushes the gun farther, thrusts inside me with it.
‘You always used to come for him this way. Why not for me?’
‘Untie me,’ I plead. ‘Please let me go.’
‘Ilan wouldn’t have. Why should I?’
For once I am not excited but very afraid, sweaty and shaking. I am beginning to feel as if I am within a new kind of dream now, not a dream of falling or flying but a dream of being frozen – the kind you are powerless to stop.
‘Ilan said the only way to get through to you was pain. The more pain, the better. The woman who wouldn’t cut you hard enough – he said you wanted her to go further. At first I didn’t believe him, but he’s right, isn’t he? You are looking for pain. You love it. You go over his death in your mind every single day just to hurt yourself.’
‘No, I was relieved when that woman stopped, I didn’t want her to hurt me. Please, this is making me afraid, it’s not turning me on. You know me, remember? You were right about me, and he was wrong. I love you, Olivia.’ I try hard to mask my fear.
‘No you don’t,’ she says under her breath, as if she were speaking only to herself. I have begun to lie now and she knows it.
She pushes the gun into me even harder than he did now, and faster.
‘Please stop,’ I tell her. Then I tense for another thrust, but I never feel it. Instead she hesitates. She withdraws the gun, and I hear metal against metal as it is replaced in its box.
‘I wish I’d never met you,’ she says. ‘I wish it had never come to this.’
Eagerly I interrupt her. ‘You love me, you don’t want to hurt me, right? We can go back to what we used to have, in the beginning.’
She is tempted, thinks about it, but finally says no. ‘I’m going to lose you whatever I do now, I can see that. So I might as well see how it felt to be him. To make you happy. To give you what you really want.’
That tone in her voice: I’ve never heard her be sarcastic before. She had been eager, sweet, ingenuous – even embarrassing. Until she met Ilan; until she met me.
I struggle against her but it is no contest, for I am already tied up, and soon she binds around my mouth the familiar gag. And for the first time it happens, as it never happened in all the games you played with me, Ilan: I can neither see nor speak.
She adjusts the blindfold over my eyes, to make sure I cannot see even a sliver of light. And that is how I know it is ending.
It is not a razor blade this time, but a long knife – the one from our kitchen, I imagine, slipped from its wooden sheath. Against my wrists, I feel the range of its stroke, the sharpness of the blade. I feel Olivia gently trace the cuts on my arms, feel them begin to reopen.
She moves my head into her lap, to draw the blade across my neck, first tentatively but then with a stronger pull – like a cellist delicately, firmly drawing sound forth from the strings of a still body with her bow.
With one more cut, my throat will open easily to the air. In a moment I will hear it gasp like a second mouth, hear the momentary suck and gurgle of air and then hear the silence as, with blood, the air-stream is overcome. I will be drowning, after all.
I know I must do it in a few seconds, with the advantage of surprise. At my wrists I stretch the cords, and it is agony but I wrench them to stretch the silk as far as it can go, pressing my fingers together to make my hands as long and slender as I can, and then twisting them out.
I slip one hand out, and then the other. Still blind, I grab for Olivia, and in my hand I feel her hair, which I have so often touched in bed. I grab its strands, pull her head down, and she cries out. The knife clatters to the floor.
I rip the blindfold off and then the gag. I see the gout of her red hair still in my hand. Still tipped with blond, it has been torn out at the root. I open my hand in horror and let it fall.
I strain to reach the knife on the floor and in a second I have it. With it, I slice cleanly through the ties that still bind my legs. I am free; we are even, now.
She is still frozen, slowed by some drug, stilled by surprise for the few seconds I need to try to escape her. I run for my life, an animal’s flight.
The door opens smoothly and I slam it behind me. In a second I am in the elevator. I watch, as if in a movie, the doors close until they show only a slice of Olivia’s dazed, furious face, then nothing.
The elevator, with agonizing slowness, travels downward. I notice then that the cuts on my wrists, the older cuts, have stopped bleeding. But the cuts on my throat still bleed a bit. I am lucky, though: the cuts never got to that crucial depth, the bleeding never increases. A tiny veil of skin keeps the blood in me at bay – like the ribbon that held together the severed neck of the girl in the fairy tale. Yet the veil holds.
There is no other way down, I realize – no fire escape, but only a rope ladder stashed away in a closet, and Olivia won’t know about it. I jam an umbrella between the elevator doors, and slip into the basement to find old clothes to put on, too afraid to slip out into the city’s darkness while I am naked and bleeding, even as desperate to leave here as I am.
Ilan’s clothes are in the nearest boxes – his father stored some of them there after he died – and so it is in his T-shirt and trousers that I venture back to the ground floor. There I see that the elevator doors, closing and closing again, have crushed the umbrella and somehow ejected it; it lies broken on the floor. I hear the elevator rising.
* * *
I run out into the darkened streets of downtown. Tribeca always seems deserted to me – its wide streets too broad for its few residents – and never more deserted than now.
Running for my life, I move smoothly and silently – in the way I used to row in college, when the sound of my oars was like a flutter, when it was almost like no sound at all: the sound of closing a venetian blind, or of a bird’s wing, tucked in a second ago, expanding to prepare for flight.
I do not make it five blocks before I hear her behind me. I look quickly to see if she is holding the gun, and she is.
She is still a block and a half away from me, but she raises it at me, and takes aim. I dive to the pavement, scraping my arms and knees, and roll to the side, behind a Dumpster.
I hear the shot ping off something and reverberate. Then I hear someone in a high window nearby, looking down on us, scream.
Inside a nearby doorway, I see a hinged grate. I open it and slip inside. It is a small stone room, some restaurant’s odd storage space. I sit next to wine bottles and stacked boxes, and I hold my breath. I can only hope she will not find me.
Olivia slows when she gets near the Dumpster, as if she is looking for me. I see her shoes – Ilan’s shoes – and through my shock, the insanity of it all comes home to me again. Who will be my true assassin, of the two?
She pries at the grate and I hold my breath. But she decides against it, returns to the street and picks up her pace. She must believe I have somehow – under cover of this row of skewed gargantuan Dumpsters which blocked the sidewalk and obscured her view – moved on. I hear her continue running, and eventually, with relief, I hear her swift footsteps fade.
I wait awhile, to ensure she won’t double back. As I wait in the small crawlspace, I press a hand into my own blood, and I place its print on the dirty stone wall next to me. Then I draw the print downward, all the while thinking of Ilan’s smeared print on the wall of our apartment – still there, invisible.
A few minutes later, I feel brave enough to venture out. Near the Dumpster, I find the gun; she must have tossed it aside. I check it and realize why: it is empty now.
I head back to our apartment – believing it is the one place she won’t expect to find me. I am cautious, entering, but I know she has no weapon now, and I cannot imagine that she would have given up looking in the direction she believed I’d run.
Once inside the apartment, I make sure she is not there, and I use the special dead bolt, which cannot be opened from outside.
* * *
I think of calling the police, but I know that if I turn Olivia in, she is likely to tell the press everything that’s happened. She’ll try to shame me, and I may lose my career, my reputation – even the trusts, which I remember that Mr Resnick can still revoke. This might, I think, be just enough to convince him to do so.
And so I do not call. Instead I wash my cuts – wash the blood from them and see how deep they really go, swab them and bandage them and camouflage them with a scarf.
Then I call a locksmith, who arrives at six a.m. to change all the locks. He gives me the new keys, and the walls of the loft at once become a physical barrier that will protect me. I pay him, and am glad to pay him. I survived; I have returned.
Though I am glad to have the new locks, I do not really believe Olivia will return here. Instead I believe that after failing to find me, she’ll collapse, exhausted, to sleep in her studio. Then the next morning, I imagine, she will awaken with shame and horror at where her life has gone, what it has become.
As the drug evaporates out of her blood, she will blink and be appalled. As if fro
m a dream, she will awaken – as I did, in the end, with Ilan – in disbelief at what has occurred, questioning if it could have been real, if it actually happened.
* * *
When the locksmith leaves, I go up to our roof to see the sun rise as if it were a symbol, or a song.
From there, I watch the city perform its early-morning orderings, its careful arrangings – as its trucks are unloaded, its newspapers slipped into their places on newsstands for their headlines to quietly blare, its flowers arrayed outside its grocery stores in their plastic barrels. For the first time in a long time, I am glad to be alive, more glad than I can say. I whirl around to survey every perspective, to see the life on every nearby street.
And there is Olivia. She faces me, from the far corner of the roof, like a terrible reflection of myself. She is closer to the door that leads down to the loft than I am, and so she has me trapped up here. In her hand, there is the long knife.
She must have doubled back after all, beaten me back to the apartment and then waited for me here on the roof – waited patiently until I arrived here. Did she know me well enough to know that I would want to come up here to see the city, to remind myself that other, happier lives continue around me?
Olivia walks toward the door that leads to the down staircase, and stands in front of it, blocking it. There is no other way down.
‘Let it go,’ I tell her. ‘It’s over now.’
‘It’s been over for you for a long time,’ she says. ‘For me, it never will be over. I know you locked me out – I heard you talking to that man – but it’s not that easy to keep me out. You’re never going to be able to keep me out.’
We stand there like that, each against her own small backdrop of buildings, each exhausted and determined, each still dressed in Ilan’s clothes – as if the part of him that loved life were confronting the part that loved death. It occurs to me that the last time this happened, it was death that won.
It is then that I remember the heavy, empty gun in my pocket.