The Testimony

by Laura London

  “I could have broken your goddamn arm.” The words were close to a shout. Christine felt the fragile peace she had been living within shatter around her.

  “I don’t know why you’re mad at me.” She tried to make her voice light and to smile, but her mouth could produce only a pained twist. “I’m just the victim.”

  He brought her against his chest with appalling swiftness, and when he spoke, each word had a scalpel precision. “Don’t ever call yourself a victim again,” he whispered, the softness of the words erasing nothing from their force. “Do you understand?”

  His hands left her in a sharp movement and her own failures came tumbling down on her, cold failures that pierced the final afterglow of their lovemaking, and the last warmth fled her body. The wine taste was strong in her mouth, faintly sticky and sour. And she thought, What am I going to do? Dear God, what can I do? He’s losing faith in himself. And he’s losing faith in me because I won’t face the new dark corners in him.

  He had gone to stand near the mirror, his hands clenched on the barre at his hips. Frigid-blue artificial light cut shallow patterns on his bare chest and revealed the hardness of his legs through the age-softened denims.

  She wanted to get up and dress, but the brief period of nudity it would require seemed suddenly like an excruciating ordeal. The still-flickering candle flame caught her distraughtly wandering gaze. How the harsh fluorescence had dwarfed the flame. It had become an anachronism, an oddly embarrassing reminder of the past sweet moments, a stubbornly glimmering symbol oblivious of its inappropriateness.

  She looked back at Jesse. Damn him. He was closing up. She could see it happening. And here she was alone with the fear. And she was so tired of being alone, and so tired of being afraid. Why was this happening to her? There must be some mistake. Problems like these belonged to the old Christine, who never quite understood how to put her life in order. She thought of Indiana’s warning, that she had been bartering her inner security. Now even that had failed, and she didn’t know how to help either of them anymore.

  “I’d like to know what I’m being accused of.” Her words were sudden, fierce, and his answer was as close to expressionless as she had ever heard from him.

  “Is that what I was doing?”

  “Oh. Well, weren’t you, then? Then everything’s okay, I guess. You weren’t accusing me of anything.”

  Jesse held her in a gelid stare during the echoing silence that followed. Then he said, “I hate it when you playact in a fight.”

  It was by far the cruelest thing he had ever said to her. He knew her sensitivity; he knew she had to build walls to guard that secret inner person. Her defenses were not external armor; they were part of her chemistry, and he had never attacked them. She retreated farther into the quilt, cold fibers sharp against her cold skin. There was a moment of sheer terror as he walked over to pick up his jacket and she thought he was going to leave, just like that. But he fished in his jacket pocket for something.

  “I’ve started smoking again, Chris. I’ll probably quit, but I haven’t organized the energy yet.” She watched numbly as he drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket. “If you want me to go outside, that’s all right with me.”

  “No.” Her stiff lips made the brief word more brief, a chipped syllable. She knew he’d smoked at one time, that he’d quit in college, but that had been before she knew him. It was a stranger who stood against the barre with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

  “I don’t know you right now,” she said. “Out of nowhere I’m the enemy and I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”

  “What you’ve done wrong… who’d be able to accuse you of doing anything wrong? You don’t do wrong things, do you, Chris? You’re too damned careful. Inflexibly ladylike to the end, spoon-feeding me tolerance and compassion as if that could wipe out six months in prison. Christine, it’s sticking all over me like hot tar, and I’d tear myself open to keep it from messing you up too. But what am I supposed to do if you won’t tell me when that’s happening?”

  “Jesse, I don’t want to fight. I can’t stand fighting with you like this.” Grasping for a compromise, watching him swallow smoke and release it in an unbroken line, she said, “You think I should have told you about the bruises. I think you should be more understanding about why I didn’t say anything. Okay. We’re both equally guilty. So let’s drop it, okay?”

  The closed expression vanished from Jesse’s highboned face. “What does equality have to do with it? What are we—Noah’s animals marching off to the ark, two by two, equal this and equal that? I want to know why you’ve refused to respond to a single thing I’ve said.”

  “All right, all right.” Clutching the quilt around her, she staggered awkwardly to her feet, sending an empty wineglass rolling across the floor in spinning circles. “You want a response? All right, we’ll do everything your way. If you so much as breathe on me the wrong way, I’ll climb all over you! I’ll berate you for hours on end! No”—she was losing control completely—“I’ll call the DA and ask him to begin a John Doe investigation!”

  “Or,” he said with false mildness, “you can go to Indy and tell him all about it.”

  She fell very still. In a quiet voice, she said, “How did you know I saw Indy?”

  “Angela Currie mentioned seeing you with Indy strolling in Walker’s Point yesterday. She honked her horn half a dozen times, but neither of you noticed.”

  “You don’t say.” She could feel herself paling. “I hope she didn’t leave out the times Indiana and I were seen together necking at Packers’ games.” Suddenly she was on her knees weeping into the quilt, and she could hear herself say in a serrated whisper, “I only wanted someone to tell me it was going to be all right.”

  She knew he had come to stand near her, and she knew he was looking down at her bent shoulders even though she couldn’t see his face. But he made no move to take her in his arms, which had never happened before, and she wanted to ask him to, but somehow she couldn’t.

  “I know,” he returned softly, and came down beside her, sitting on his heels, lifting her chin. “Please don’t let me harm you again. I don’t know how to make you understand what it does to me.”

  It was much later, driving home beside him, that she realized he hadn’t said it was going to be all right.

  Chapter Six

  It was not all right. The dream returned.

  It began with Bach—“Air on the G String.” This was one of the few classical pieces he could actually identify, because whenever Christine played it, he would ask her for the name, and when she answered he would say, “The which string?” making her repeat it until she would laugh and throw something at him and call him a philistine.

  He heard Bach, and saw the cell around him, and felt Christine at his side. The bars were a moving pattern, a carousel pierced by an intermittent light like the sun through a thunderstorm. This time when the room shrank, the bars multiplied, and he could feel Christine’s horror racing with his, beyond his, and he needed desperately to protect her. He wanted to reach out to the bars and drag them away from her, but some slight murmur in his brain reminded him not to touch anything, not to use his hands. It was wrong; it might hurt Christine. So he lay still as a rock and didn’t scream, didn’t move as the bars came closer, crushing him.…

  When he woke, the moon was out and shining through the open window and a mist of sweat nipped his skin, making a clammy pool between his shoulder blades. He jerked his head up to look for Christine but—relief—she was lying next to him, curled like a fawn, sleeping soundly. He lay staring at the ceiling until the dawn birds began their song and an orchid-pink glow of sunlight formed on the windowsill.

  The next night he didn’t sleep at all, but lay watchfully quiet beside her. The clock’s red digits said one forty-five when he got up, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, and went downstairs for his jacket.

  The whoosh of the heavy front door woke Christine as he went out, and then it was she who waited, bli
nking in the dark until he returned thirty minutes later scented of the spring night and more faintly of cigarette smoke. He slid nude into the bed, and she put her arms around him.

  “Jess, can’t you sleep?”

  “No. It’s nothing. Don’t worry.”

  She gently rubbed his shoulder and the curve of his neck. His muscles had the pliancy of granite. She could feel his tension, his isolation. He was staring at the ceiling, not acknowledging the movements of her hands, and she wondered if he was even aware of them. The stranger. Searching for a way to bring him back, she said, “Can I get you some warm milk? A glass of wine?”

  He leaned over and kissed her lips. “I’ve tried that.” She persisted. “Want to make love on all fours?” She heard him choke, and, sleepily encouraged, she said, “Maybe I should slip into my diamond-and-leather garter belt and tie myself to the bed for hot sex.”

  He turned on his side to be closer to her, making the bedcover ruffle up against her face in a puff of air. He laughed a little and pulled it back down. His lips touched her cheek briefly. “Go back to sleep, Chris.”

  “Don—” Her voice went up an octave as she yawned. “Donna Crosby across the street says her husband ties her up all the time. She says I ought to get you to tie me up.”

  “Tell you what. Instead of giving the Crosbys a box of fudge at Christmas, we’ll go over and tie them both up.”

  The tip of her nose twitched and she snuggled closer to him and rubbed it on his chest. “Did you ever want to tie me up, Jess?”

  “With yellow ribbons, maybe…”

  He kept her close to him and stroked her until she fell asleep, but he couldn’t follow her and he watched the sun rise again.

  The day was long and irritating because he couldn’t seem to get the editorial bureaucracy in gear to cut through the red tape and put him quickly back on his court beat. When he came back from work, he found Christine in the rear garden in his stretched and faded Marquette sweatshirt. She was bending over a yellow plastic pail filled with scarlet parrot tulips and daffodils bright as chicks. He scooped her up with an arm under her shoulders and another under her knees, and the pail knocked against his legs to tip grassy water on his pants. He planted kisses on every part of her wind-ruddied cheek that came into range, and his face was full of her hair as he said, “My day really bit it, sweetheart. Hope you did better.”

  She slapped his back heartily with her free hand. “I did great! This afternoon I withdrew our savings from the bank and used the money to buy a handful of magic beans.”

  “In the morning we have a beanstalk to the clouds?”

  “No.” She grinned. “Chili. Mr. Jaroch was over, by the way. He wanted us to sign a petition demanding that the Crosbys cut their grass and take the Christmas lights off their pine. But I said the Crosbys were our friends and how their lawn looked didn’t matter to us, so we wouldn’t sign.”

  “I agree. Their grass is irrelevant. What we need here is a petition to make Crosby stop tying up his wi—” Her hand trying to cover his mouth, her scandalized laughter, and her urgent glance at the open windows next door stopped his voice. He carried her into the house, Christine struggling and trying to defend herself with the pail, leaving a trail of flowers all the way to the bedroom, where they made love half in, half out of their wet clothing.

  It was afterward, while he was lazily picking grass and bits of stem from her breasts and his mouth, that he said, “Chris, I’ve been thinking.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  He took a little floss of her hair between his fingers and let it run through, enjoying the way it caught the spring sunlight. “I think I’d better sleep in the other bedroom for a while.”

  She studied him for a time in a painstaking way and finally said, “You think it might help your insomnia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. All God’s children gotta sleep. So be it, then.”

  In the kitchen an hour later she was poking at the chili in the Crock-Pot with a wooden spoon. I’ve got to let him do what he thinks he needs to do to feel better, she was thinking. It’s not even a question of letting him—I must support him. He knows what he needs. But a tear slipped off her nose and burst into steam on the beans and she said aloud, “There’s not a bit of magic in you damn things. Not a bit.”

  Someone—Jesse’s father, she thought—had told her once that partners in marriage were like the opposite ends of a carpenter’s level. What came to one came to the other. Even unspoken, their shared desperateness to mend the balance brought them closer. That was how it was supposed to work.

  It was not easy for her to chart the undercurrents because none of them were familiar. The only easy thing would have been to let her imagination run wild as she lay alone in her bed speculating about the things that made it difficult for Jesse to fall asleep beside her. On every rational plane, she knew that none of this came about through some failing of hers, though below the surface, doubts stirred that never resolved themselves into thought. She told herself that she was too strong to become involved in a meaningless welter of self-reproach. She was too mature not to cope with the first true crisis in their lives together.

  Yet vividly real, indelible, was the image of David Harris going to federal prison for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War and leaving his wife Joan Baez. They had been dedicated, they had been strong, they had been in love, but when David Harris came home from serving his ideals, neither his will nor hers had been enough to save their marriage.

  Probably that had nothing to do with what would happen between her and Jesse. She wished she could stop thinking about it. At times she was afraid her thwarted emotions would spill down around her in a landslide. A week passed without that, however, and though there were probably things she and Jesse weren’t telling each other, and they did not make love, and Jesse continued to be uncharacteristically tense and distracted, there were moments of fun, and there was companionship. Life had a strange way of tricking you into being much braver than you really were, as she had discovered while Jesse was in jail. Mundane tasks intruded into every tragedy; the necessary rituals of eating, sleeping, and clothing the body had to be followed, giving structure to the suffering.

  * * *

  Jesse played soccer on Thursday evening.

  Beyond the hilltop field of ragged municipal grass, a light lake wind tickled the pointing skyline of church spires, steep roofs, and tall trees coming into leaf. It sucked Jesse’s soccer clothes into a hard outline of his chest and thighs as he ran backward, watching the ball. As the ball got closer to the wrong goal, Christine’s view was suddenly blocked by her sister-in-law Beth, one step down from her on the bleachers, who stood up to shout, “Get it out of there! Get it out of—” Beth collapsed with a moan as the other team scored, one hand clutching the bulge of her pregnant abdomen.

  “Beth, are you all right?” Christine bent forward.

  “No! Now we’ll go into the half two points down, because the ref is going to blow the whistle as soon as they set up and—there, what did I tell you?”

  Christine suppressed a grin as the team began to collect in front of the bleachers by the big water thermos. Even with the recent upsurge in the popularity of American soccer, the long-established ethnic teams ruled the Milwaukee leagues. The Hungarian team that Jesse and his brothers played on had been around for twenty-five years. Club Magyar. Ten years ago, if someone had told her that in another decade she would be a member of a social organization called Club Magyar, she would have said, “Huh?” Ten years ago she wouldn’t have known that a Magyar and a Hungarian were the same.

  Nowhere else in mid-America could you hear more people speaking in heavy accents than at a Milwaukee soccer game. In her first season Christine had heard all the languages of Babel: Latvian, Serbian, Persian, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Hungarian. According to Jesse, it was often pretty hot stuff. He said that by now she could probably go to any corner of the globe and be ready with a local oath either threatening blood vengeance o
r requiring it.

  Jesse came toward the bleachers talking to his older brother, with Sandor’s narrow arm draping his shoulders like a garland. Sandy was a taller, more prominently boned version of Jesse, and, because her brother-in-law had been growing his hair since he’d returned from combat in Vietnam, he gave Christine a fair idea of how Jesse would look in a ponytail.

  Sandy looked up at his wife Beth and his face dissolved in a landscape of creases that revealed exactly what a handsome older man he would be in forty years. He jumped up on the seat beside her, tugged gently at the hem of her red sweatshirt, and said, “Hey, Jess! Want to see where I keep my extra soccer ball?” He laughed as Beth slapped his hand away. Straightening his goalie shirt, he said, “I suppose if I let another goal through I don’t get dinner?”

  “For a week!” Beth said, but she was grinning. “Keep playing like this, and next time we play husbands against wives, we’ll murder you.”

  Feeling great since Jesse had come up beside her and put his hand on her knee, Christine leaned forward and feigned a shudder of revulsion. “I’ll never be on another wives’ team against these brutes. Last time they wiped up the field with us, twenty to one!”

  Beth was unknotting the leather ribbon from Sandor’s wild ponytail. “As if we’d let you quit. You made our only goal.”

  With a gleam of unholy amusement, Sandor said, “Jesse let that through.”

  “No way. It came at me like greased lightning. Even you couldn’t have stopped that goal.” Jesse leaned over to absorb the tantalizing vibrations of Christine’s mouth. “And besides, I’m not very good with my hands.”

  Beth glanced up from retying her husband’s neatened tresses. “That’s not what the girls used to say at Pulaski High.”

  Watching the lightning-fast movements of Jesse’s legs as he ran back to the field beside Sandor, Christine dropped onto the bench beside Beth and said amiably, “Okay, Mrs. Ludan the elder, what about the girls at Pulaski High?”