by Robin Page
Jocelyn drives away from the hotel. Ten minutes later, she parks her car down Via de la Paz, rolls her windows down, hears the water crashing against the shore. She takes a few moments to think about what she is doing. What is an affair? She wishes she had been able to spend the night. She chides herself for having the thought. She wants her family too, early-morning eggs, a hug after a bad dream in the dark night from Conrad. She sits a few minutes more, realizing she wants both. She rolls up her windows, puts her car in gear. She has to get home. She does not want to worry her husband, and she wants to kiss her sleeping daughter goodnight.
Chapter Fourteen
Claudette
1
AT FIRST, WHEN SHE FINDS THE VARIOUS ARTICLES, SHE ASSUMES HE IS her mother’s lover. As unlikely as it is that her mother would get up for anything, she thinks she might get up for a man like this, a man from another life, one before now. She presumes they were lovers first in Kigali.
In the pictures from the magazine, he sits at a glass desk. An office with a view of the city. He is handsome, tall, and lean as a dancer. He is relaxed, smiling, with a small-scale community of buildings in front of him on a large worktable. He is the color of wet sand, short curls peppered with gray. She reads about him—Rwandan refugee, no children, no wife. Her father has explained to her that a wife and a child were a burden in the war. Before he died, he told her, time and again, how lucky he was to have saved them both, because, at war, it is not good to have someone else to worry about. She knows all about refugees. Her mother, her father, and now this man.
The man in the magazine is a renowned landscape architect: Simon Bonaventure. There is a list of his accomplishments, and she has heard of some of his more famous projects: Griffith Park’s equestrian center, the outdoor pavilion at the new Getty, and of course the Greenway in Boston. She is sure that he is the kind of man whom her mother would like. He is absolutely other to her father, who has the scent and stain of manure on his hands. A smirk alights on her face, a vision of her mother, that version of her that she has never known, sneaking around for sex (she must have been alive once). Why else would she keep all these articles? Why has she tracked him for all this time?
She reaches into the box for something else to look at, something as unimportant as a souvenir, maybe love letters. Anything that will teach her more about her parents. There is so much to riffle through, a maze of memories. Later, she will find an undoing of self.
2
BUT BEFORE THAT, THERE IN THE CRATES AND BOXES AND ALBUMS, IS HER history. Exhausting, unfamiliar. Her parents have never shared these treasures with her. She wonders what else she will discover now that they have died. As she looks, it takes some time for her to see what she is seeing. She lifts the evidence of her family carefully, as if it were delicate glass.
Tiny black-and-white photos of places she doesn’t recognize, people she does not know. She inspects each thing carefully. Like a philatelist with tweezers, she could be sorting stamps. Each photo laid there on the attic floor: two boys with kites drawn behind them, six young men with glassy eyes, drinking something in a bowl from a straw. All holding machetes. She cheers when she finds one of her mother smoking, smiling, holding a baby in her arms. She is proud that she has recognized her mother, so unlike her is the picture. On the back, her mother’s name is there, just for confirmation. Legato, she thinks, settling down to stare at the picture. Tied. Feel where you come from.
She knows she must look at these things, fill her mind in order to defer her grief. The heft of her parents’ death has not yet hit her, and so she organizes and works and delays and sees what is here that she can hold on to, what is here for her to take with her into the future life that will be just hers, her husband’s, and the baby’s.
She doesn’t leave the attic, not even to eat. She cries often and falls asleep from exhaustion. Dreams find purchase. Sudden liquid, filling gaps. The dreams are of blazing fires, of breathing underwater. Babies sliding headfirst out of their mothers’ wombs. Always wet, slick floors. She wakes, her body sore against unfinished walls. She wonders what her parents might have been thinking as their car skidded off the Tobin Bridge, the water sucking them in like an intake pipe, the doors of the car as heavy as cinder block walls. Her father was a strong man. He would have tried. Opening the windows just an inch. Waiting, waiting, for the balance—there must be almost as much water inside as out. Knowing there would be just the one chance, the one breath to take and then go. The car sinking still. Maybe giving in, maybe embracing. What must he have seen other than the rising water and her mother’s panicked face? A white light, perhaps. Her own birth. The hills of Rwanda—his childhood home. She hopes he’s seen the fetus inside her as a formed child. He had longed for a grandson.
She returns to her task when she wakes. Cardboard smooth as sheets. A monogrammed shirt. Expensive and out of place. The identity card is something she feels first and then sees. It is rough, the size of a passport, dirty and wrinkled, a thing of war. She wonders why her father has kept it, but the things we keep—hair from our dead loved ones, rooms like shrines, pictures of people we do not know—are impossible to understand. She opens it. Sudden night and must in the attic, but even in the poor light, she sees that it is not her father at all. It isn’t even her young father. She opens the little pamphlet wider, stands at the attic window to get the last of the setting sun. A series of Xs. Tutsi marked. Her father was a Hutu—a historical underdog. He has explained everything to her, and she understands in a way that is deeper, more complex. A life lived inside history is different from a life lived outside it.
A name is there on the card, the name that she has seen in the magazines: Simon Bonaventure.
What? she thinks. Her brain unable to catch up. Her mother’s boyfriend?
Her high school French is good enough to get by. Sector: Kigali. Birthplace: Kigali. Wife: Vestine Bonaventure.
Wife? she thinks. In the magazine, he said he didn’t have a wife.
On the opposite page, she reads her own first name, her own middle name. Category: Children. Beside it in the same swirling handwriting, her own birthdate. She flips the card, flips it back. Rereads the names. She feels her legs weak as noodles. A cat is mewling somewhere in the night outside the attic window. She presses her forehead against the card. Feels woozy. Why haven’t I eaten all day?
One daughter, it reads: Claudette Simona Bonaventure. Quarter-size birthmark on collarbone. She reaches up, touches the spot. Fingers hot against her skin. She is afraid they will leave marks. Claudette, she thinks. But that name is mine.
3
SHE TRIES NOT TO BETRAY THEM: IMMACULEE. ABRAHM. MOTHER. Father. She tries to forget about the man in the magazine, the words on the identity card.
Her parents, the debris of them, are found bloated and pale and trapped inside their Chevrolet Corvair. They are her family. They are the ones who have raised her. She does not need anyone else.
When the full weight of grief comes to her, the awareness that her parents are never coming back, she doesn’t know what to do with it. There are so many questions, and yet no one to answer them. Certainty is a sinkhole that makes her lose her footing. One person can never know another. She touches her belly. Will I know this child?
She goes to the box over and over again, looting its treasures. She stares at the identity card as if the words can miraculously change. “My father was a good father,” she says in the attic, but there is no one to hear. “My father loved me.” A pen in an empty room. A bare desk. A white page: I believe I am your daughter. But no, that isn’t quite right. Biological daughter is considered, but again, it is wrong, like something made in a petri dish. So many limits to language.
I am the child of Abrahm, she says to herself. This I know, and yet I know it is not so.
She has perfect cursive handwriting, taught to her by her father when she was just seven years old. His hand wrapped around her own, quiet, a prayer—the soil stains in the folds of his thumb. Dark skin again
st light. I do not know. Will you know?
Chapter Fifteen
Jocelyn
1
AFTER THE CAR AND THE HOTEL ROOM, AND WHAT JOCELYN LIKES TO think of as their “agreement,” they meet every few days, mostly to have sex, but also for the pleasure of each other’s company. She continues therapy, but by half, using it as an excuse when Conrad asks where she is going.
One morning, she and Kate decide to hike along the trails of Santa Maria in a small hippie community just north of the club. They hold hands for half the time, knowing no one they know would be caught dead in this town of Buddhas and peace signs. When they’ve almost made it back to their cars, they sit down on a large boulder, just looking out at the view. Jocelyn holds Kate’s hand in her lap and rubs the slick polished fingernails with her thumb. She remembers that first day in the car. She remembers after, thinking of ropes and knots, a lack of reciprocation. Only her doing, making.
She looks at Kate, the fine skin, the flushed cheeks, and realizes she doesn’t even know her age. She resists asking. She likes that they are strangers. Within the anonymity lies control.
She wants to ask her if she would like it, if she would be willing, but she is afraid. It is not easy. She does not fully understand what she wants or why she wants it, but she has to. She leans closer to whisper.
“I want to tie you up,” she says.
She doesn’t look at Kate. She is shy with her desire. It is different from what she feels with Conrad; with Conrad there has been time, growth, years and years of getting to know one another, like a tree growing outward, steady and slow and secure. With Conrad there is expectation, history, a dead mother, dead siblings, obligation, all her sins between them known, except this one. He sees who she really is. It is tiring to live with a witness.
“Seriously?” Kate says. She laughs, almost snorts. She is too old for the laughter. It is the laugh of a fourteen-year-old on the back of a bus giggling with girlfriends about blow jobs. About fucking.
A blush of red comes into Kate’s face, and Jocelyn notices the freckles that speckle the globes of her cheeks. The tow-blonde hair blows. She has asked her to take it down.
“Is that a no?” Jocelyn asks. A singular twitch. There. Waiting. Silence then for a long time. Jocelyn worries, but then:
“Okay,” Kate says. The word is a breath between them. Vulnerability. Excitement. “Yes,” Kate says. “Please.” She is pretending submission. She is very, very intense. Waiting. Wanting too. “When?”
“Later,” Jocelyn says. “A different time. When I haven’t asked you. When I’ve told you. When I make you.”
Kate covers her face with her hands. She runs her fingers through the long hair that Jocelyn likes to feel and smell, especially in bed. Release, open, fall.
Jocelyn pushes Kate back gently against the flat edge of the rock. Below them there is a long drop into the Santa Monica Mountains, but they’ve got plenty of room. Their legs graze. Jocelyn rolls on top of her. Kate kisses her, pulls her down fiercely. The talking has made them want one another.
“I hear a dog coming,” Jocelyn says, looking behind them out onto the trail.
“Fucking hikers,” Kate says.
“Who cares?” Jocelyn says, and starts with Kate’s shirt.
2
BECAUSE IT GOES ON DAY AFTER DAY, AND BECAUSE NO ONE SUSPECTS them, and also because it feels so good, the affair gains a certain morality. No one knows, so who could be hurt by it? It feels destined and outside themselves, as if it has been ordained by the universe, as if they cannot help it.
There is a kind of urgency to it too. Deep down they know it must come to an end, and so they want to get their fill.
Sometimes they are gentle with one another. Sometimes they are violent. There are rules, which they make almost immediately. Jocelyn will not be spanked. She will not be tied down. Kate likes a rope but not metal handcuffs. Kate likes to be hurt, to take the sting of what they do together back to the court.
At drill, after particularly rough sessions, Jocelyn warms when she sees Kate in long-sleeved shirts and long pants. She knows the wrists are red where the rope has held her. The skin is pink on the bottom of her buttocks, the tops of her thighs. She wonders briefly what Kate tells her wife but finds that she really doesn’t care.
After the quiet domination of these sessions, they make love and talk and then make love again. There is never enough time for them. They are dizzy with want. Their only worry is that they will be found out. But when they are together, all of it is without shame or struggle, or history. Each time, they are absolutely uninhibited. It is absolutely new. They are strangers who meet and fuck, sordid and open with their desire—uncaring, because they know they will never have to face each other again.
3
JOCELYN WAKES IN THE DIM LIGHT OF THE HOTEL ROOM. SHE IS STARTLED at first. She sits up quickly, naked.
“You said Lucy had a playdate,” Kate says. “I canceled my afternoon lessons. I didn’t want to wake you, lazy girl.”
“Jesus Christ. I had no idea where I was. How long have I been asleep?”
Kate shushes Jocelyn, calms her. “We have time,” she says. “I’ve been watching the clock.” She smiles a bit. “And you.”
Jocelyn is lying on her belly, groggy and weak from the sleep and the sex. Kate’s eyes are on her, a dark green in this light—so different now than they are on the tennis court. Jocelyn feels fingers tracing the ridges and scars on her back. She flinches. She pulls inside herself. She pushes Kate’s hand away, tries to turn, but Kate holds on to her—a hand on her hip to stop her.
“What are those?” Kate asks.
Jocelyn does not move. She feels a wall, hard as concrete, erect between them.
“I didn’t want to ask, you know. I mean before,” Kate continues. “Did Conrad do that to you? He doesn’t hurt you, does he? That doesn’t look like fun.”
Jocelyn tries not to move, not to hear. She thinks if she holds still, she can keep it out. She can be in this space with her lover. She wishes for perfection. Complete separation between here and before. Between now and later. Just this—a daydream of pure. She closes her eyes. Take it back, take it back, take it back. The air is chill in the room, and she feels the scars as if they are something nailed to her body.
“It’s nothing,” she says, feeling Kate’s fingers moving along the back of her thigh now, finding and feeling her way along the branches of another atrocity, trying to understand.
“You shouldn’t let him hurt you.”
Jocelyn turns her head on her pillow, facing away. In this space too, with a precise blade, a sharp knife, Gladys has managed to cut a hole. Even in death she is powerful. The residue of her pierces through.
“Conrad would never hurt me,” she says, simply. “Conrad saved my life.”
The skin is tender again, as if slit open by Kate’s painted fingernails. Fresh, even. The body has a memory for pain.
4
JOCELYN KNOWS TO PROTECT HERSELF AGAINST TENDERNESS AT ALL COSTS. Do not love, she reminds herself; this a lesson taught to her as a child by her sister. Do not grow interested. Do not share.
But sometimes it is hard. Sometime she forgets to find distance. Sometimes, to the tip of her tongue the words come, and she thinks she might say, I love you. She thinks she might ask, Can we be something more? When that happens, and as it happens, she fights to gain purchase again. She sits on top of Kate, and she pretends that Kate is something to be had. Just for her. She draws out a scarf, an item she brings with her for just this purpose. They are grown-ups. They do not have to pretend that they do not want these things. The scarf is a long one—Hermès. She blindfolds her lover and then pulls the two sides of its length, crisp and taut through Kate’s lips. She ties the ends behind the slope of Kate’s neck. Kate always protests, just a bit, never very convincingly, and then she allows her hands to be tied by rope, she allows her shirt to be unbuttoned. Jocelyn watches for minutes, seeing the rise and fall of breath, saying
nothing, not touching her for many moments, after the rope.
In Kate, there is always the squirming need, the dirty girl whom Jocelyn likes, whom she had hoped for so many months ago. Jocelyn is pleased by this. She senses balance again. Confirmation that what they have is not love.
She kisses Kate lightly and then withdraws. She touches just the tips of her nipples and sits back. Jocelyn moves her hands and fingers between Kate’s inner thighs, like a feather there—light and then less light. She listens to the signals of Kate’s breathing and then pinches her nipples gently, and then harder, over and over again. Kate writhes, moves in ripples. Jocelyn waits for her to ignite, for the small flame of need to expand and make her desperate. Then she pulls away. She studies her. She is like something she would make. She undoes the scarf that keeps her quiet when she is almost beside herself.
Jocelyn, she hears, but it is breath, not a word.
Jocelyn licks one nipple, then the other. There is a cry of pleasure from Kate, which Jocelyn takes into her own mouth, and then she takes Kate’s tongue too, and then she tastes the hollow of her neck, of Kate’s belly, the space between Kate’s legs. She hears the rope, the whisper and rub of it, as Kate tries to move her body more intensely into Jocelyn’s face. Jocelyn pulls back, just a bit. She is certain Kate can feel only the warmth of her breath. Kate cannot reach her anymore. She is safe. She presses her body forward, almost there.
What do you want? Jocelyn asks. They are not shy. You can have whatever you want. But you have to ask for it.
5
“IT WASN’T A HOLIDAY, SO WE KNEW,” SHE SAYS IN THE SMALL OFFICE. “WE never got gifts anyway. Holiday or not.”
She is loose and free from the sex with Kate. She wishes she could go straight home, enjoy the day. She doesn’t want to be here bringing in the past, but she is here again for Conrad. For help he thinks she needs, and Dr. Bruce is invading, asking, pressing. She is always trying to put her back.