“What?” He laughed, stepping close. “You look …”
He had a hand in the back of her pants, but there wasn’t much room. She felt immense next to him, and ashamed. He was pulling at her. The other hand made a fist at her crotch. “Wait,” she said, “I just …” She just wanted to lie flat, she thought, so she wouldn’t seem so, so her body wouldn’t be so …
“Come on.” It was a litany. He pulled her down. “I want to see you. I’ve never seen you.” It was incredible how he moved, given this room to move. He was feline with claws, but sheathed claws, and everywhere he bared her skin it became as beautiful as his own. She felt herself twist off her pants, but he wanted to take off her underpants himself. She was still sticky from the car, from the walk. He made his hand hard and put it between her thighs. For the second time in an hour, he dragged her bra across her nipples and went for them, his mouth tender but frantic. Her milk let down instantly. The bra, the last scrap of fabric between them, he threw away across the room.
So this is what it looks like, Heather thought a moment later, this thing she had always done by heart, by touch. Always before, this sensation of lying beneath him, of being fucked, of reaching across his back or farther down, pulling him into her, had made its own kind of image—of something encased, she thought, and dark, and tightly wound. But now she could see the individuality of Ashley’s limbs, the hands moving at will, the legs searching separately for purchase. And she saw that she was not only lying under him, not just blankly receiving him, but that she had an agenda of her own, and a talent, and a grace. She had always loved to touch between his legs at just this moment, for instance, to heft the tiny but limitlessly meaningful weight of his scrotum, but now, for the first time, she could see how her hand was touching him in its accustomed ways; she could see the elegance of her hand as it moved, and its confidence, and the sight moved her deeply. She saw how, fully naked, he became a whole, a single form united in purpose, and that this purpose was herself. She was moving faster against him, but he kissed her and pulled away. Heather watched him, bereft but waiting. “Turn over,” Ashley said.
It made sense, she thought, when her shock passed. This made perfect sense, because wouldn’t he want to make some gesture of novelty, to do something never before attempted—at least by them—to signify that they were setting out anew together? That everything was different now? She let him guide her. She didn’t say no, though it hurt this way, though it wouldn’t have occurred to her, on her own, to suggest this. “Do you mind?” he said hoarsely, after a moment, and she shook her head no, because she was finding, gradually, that she didn’t, that the tightness of his front against her back felt good to her, that even in this most intimate of her openings the sensation he made was one of safety, and even, somehow, pleasure. She closed her eyes in amazement and pushed back against him, which took his breath away. There was nothing at all between them, Heather thought, and there was everything between them. She came in his open hand, elated and lost.
And then, in the luxury of this space and warmth, they stretched out, side by side, in silence. Outside, the river was muted to the point of imperceptibility, but she liked to think of it there nonetheless, as the barrier they had crossed to find this good place. Ashley had one arm thrown across her chest, the other crooked beneath his own head. The bag of fabric beneath her was soft, but the plastic felt sticky against her bare back. She turned her face to him. “I’m so happy,” she said. Her voice was soft, sated and heavy. “I love you so much.”
He smiled vaguely. His eyes were closed.
“I can’t believe you did that for me.”
“Yeah?” he said. “If you’d wanted it, you could have asked before.”
“What?” Heather said. Then she laughed. “No. I mean, I can’t believe you chose me that way, in front of them.”
Languidly he turned his head to her. “What do you mean?”
“You know.” She brushed his long hair back off her face. She loved his hair, though it smelled faintly of paint. “Instead of Sue.”
“Sue was wrong to follow us,” Ashley said simply. “She can be such a bitch. She knew when she married me I wouldn’t put up with that.” He was quiet for a moment. “Still,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s clear that this is really getting to be too stressful for her. Maybe for us, too. Tonight’s made that clear.”
“Oh, I agree,” Heather said. “It’s a turning point.” She waited. In the gloom she watched her own chest rise and fall beneath Ashley’s arm. Say it, she was thinking. Say the words. She was willing them into the realm of the audible, conjuring them out of silence. Tell me, she thought.
But he didn’t. For long moments he said nothing at all. His profile frowned up at the rafters. Outside, a car drove by, and then another. The sounds faded. “Good,” she heard Ashley speak. “I’m glad you agree. I’ve been wondering how to end things.”
“I’ll help you,” said Heather eagerly. “I’ll do whatever I can.”
“Your support is the main thing. Just knowing you agree with me, that’s what’s important. And we’ll be friends, of course.”
“Of course,” Heather said. “Of course. There’s a child, after all.”
“Well, yes,” said Ashley. “Heather. You’re really great, you know.”
She nodded. She was crying, but quietly. She was full of joy.
“I didn’t think you’d react like this,” he said. “I thought … I thought you might be upset.”
A nagging idea at the back of her throat. She shook it away.
“Oh no. Never upset. I would have been happy to go on as we were. But I love you. And of course I want to be with you. I want—” She stopped herself. He hadn’t said this, precisely. But hadn’t he meant it? “I mean, if you want to, someday maybe, not necessarily soon, but when we’re settled and everything, I’ll marry you.”
That nagging thing. In the small moment that followed, it came back.
Ashley pulled himself up. He seemed weary suddenly, but his face was taut. He looked down at her, wary and amazed. “Heather.” He shook his head. “Heather, I’m already married.”
She considered the meaning of this. She couldn’t make it out.
“Well, I know that, but after.”
“I’m married. Married!” He sounded unaccountably angry. Heather frowned.
“Yes, so not right away. But after you get …” Unmarried, she was thinking. What was that word again? And why did he seem so …
“I won’t,” said Ashley. “I’m sorry, but that’s just out of the question. I thought you understood this.” He stared at her, his eyes tar-dark. “This is like a basic thing about me, Heather. How can you not have understood this?”
“Fine, it’s fine.” She tried to sound soothing, but there was panic in her throat: that nagging thing, working its way into her voice. “We don’t have to get married. It’s not important. So long as—”
“What?” he shouted. “So long as what?” He was furious. Heather sat up and crossed her arms over her chest. All of a sudden she didn’t want him to see her breasts.
“So long as … we’re together?”
He reached for his shirt and yanked it down over his head. “But this is what I’m telling you. Christ, are you thick? We’re not going to be together. This is it, tonight. And I’m sorry. Of course I’m sorry. I should have done it ages ago. So I’m a bad guy, so what! You always showed me you could look out for yourself, Heather.”
Speechless, she gaped at him.
“You always handle things. So don’t get crazy on me now.”
“But you said,” she stumbled into speech, “you said you were going to end things.”
“I am ending things!” He got to his feet. He yanked his underpants up. “Come on. This isn’t doing either of us any good. We’re …” He seemed to abandon the thought. Then he shrugged. “I’ve always liked you, Heather.”
“Liked me?” Her entire relationship with language seemed to have abandoned her. Even the parroting
of his own words was meaningless.
“Yeah. I liked you. So I beg your pardon.” He seemed angry again. He zipped his jeans with a rasp. “Come on. It’s not like I said I was gonna sweep you away or anything.” Ashley peered at her. “Did I say that?”
He hadn’t said it, she thought suddenly. He’d only done it.
“Did I?”
But she couldn’t answer. The expanse of her belly was broad and sickly-white. It felt abruptly obscene.
“Wait,” she whispered. “Just wait.”
“But why?” He was sighing. “I mean, what’s the point. Nothing’s going to change. Everybody’s dug in, you know? And I can’t make anybody happy, so there’s no sense in trying, is there?” He peered at her again, magnificent in his height. She gaped up helplessly. “And I’ll tell you something else, Heather. You’ve got some share in this, too. Oh, you can make out it’s all me, but you’re not just some slouch going along with things. You knew what you were getting into. You’re strong, even if you’re not strong enough. And that’s not my fault either, by the way.” He glared at her, briefly, but with a clear white heat. “I’ll admit to my own shortcomings, sure, but I’m not about to take the blame for your problems.”
He waited for her to ask, but she’d been left impossibly behind by now, dead weight at the roadside. She couldn’t even have formed the question, so he did it for her.
“You want to know what your problem is? I’ll tell you, if you want to know.”
She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know anything else.
“You act tough, but it’s all surface with you. Inside, you’re just …” His vocabulary dissipated in disgust. He shook his head. “If you weren’t, maybe I would leave Sue for you. If you compelled me. If you … I don’t know, if you, like, took me and compelled me to do it, if you made me feel I just had to be with you and not her. You understand? But you can’t quite do that, can you?” He glared in accusation. “You’re not even close, to tell you the truth.” Ashley groped for his sweater and twisted into it. He wrenched his long hair out of the collar and tied it up with the bandanna. Then he looked down at her again. “I could fall in love. I’m not incapable of that. I’m not just some asshole who likes to get laid—that’s a little too easy, I think. But you want to think that to make yourself feel better? Fine.”
“I—” Heather tried to break in. Wouldn’t, she was thinking. Even now. I wouldn’t think that of you.
“But don’t ask me to go along with it, because I won’t.” Ashley shook his head, his lovely curls impossibly blue in the lunar light. “You know,” he mused, suddenly contemplative, “sometimes I wonder which of you I’m more pissed at. You yank me around, both of you. You just squabble and complain, but you’re both too weak to actually do anything about the situation. Each of you, too weak to pull me away from the other one.” He shook his head, furious and put upon. “Then you make out it’s all my fault. You poor women.”
Heather felt, from some impossible distance, the wetness on her face, the cold wetness beneath her arms, between her legs, behind her knees. She was seeping, she thought, like a tree. She would wither away, it seemed to her, another husk in another hayloft. Certainly she would never actually leave here.
“I’m going now,” Ashley said. “Listen, I am sorry.”
A tin coin tossed from a gilded carriage. She tried to speak, but it came out a kind of formless breath.
“What?” He was impatient now. He was on the move.
“Where are you going?”
“Home, naturally. Now I have to deal with my wife.”
And so he went, agile and light, a small man with beautiful legs and a ponytail flipped casually over one shoulder, the point around which the world would turn if there still were a world. Heather did not move. For the longest time, for minutes made malleable by grief so that they passed with granite slowness, she did not move, but her mind was alive and her thoughts careening. Always, it seemed to her, she had known that there was such a thing as pain—deep pain, and psychic pain—and that people felt it and suffered from it, but she had not had any idea of its dimensions or its capabilities. Now pain infused her, spreading like oxygen through her lungs and moving freely along each limb, then permeating her skin and leaping out into the air, where she only breathed it in again. It suspended her, this pain. She had never known anything like it, so vicious and so relentless. Her life, the sweetness of her life, was past. Her life was past.
Heather held up one hand experimentally. The fingers moved. She brought them to her nose and smelled, but there was only the cold, which blotted smell, or perhaps the ability to smell at all was gone, too. Not that it mattered. Her curiosity was merely clinical; she just wanted to know what her new demarcations were, what it would feel like, now, to be alive for the many years left that she would have to be alive.
Because of Polly, who even in this great haze of anguish could not entirely absent herself from Heather’s awareness. She was Polly’s mother, though now she was nothing else, not anymore. She had to get up and go home somehow, and somehow learn to navigate time with her new husk-self. She had to learn to coexist with this howling thing that wouldn’t shut up and that ached so hard, and she had to learn to do it so well that no one would see it or—God forbid—guess its cause.
She wasn’t strong enough. She wasn’t strong enough to make him love her.
She had passed into her own future, a tintype landscape of false colors and blank, rigid expressions, where people moved about in brittle unhappiness. And the worst part was that Heather hadn’t even noticed the wall she must have crashed through to get here, but it was behind her now, dense and high and vigilant, blocking even the memory of those few joyful moments when she had thought he had chosen her. And she would never get back. And this would always feel the way it felt right now, which was terrible.
A naked woman, breathing quickly, clammy with cold sweat and crusted with semen, lying on a plastic bag of shredded wool in the attic of an old mill on the bank of a frozen river. Her life.
She felt for her clothes, holding up what turned out to be her shirt, for the longest time, trying to figure out how it went on. Heather put it on. And her sweater. She couldn’t find her underpants. She put her legs into her jeans, but they felt strange—the fly, it turned out, was in back, which was wrong. She took the pants off and put them on again. She discovered that it wasn’t difficult to do these things. You just thought them and they sort of happened, even if you couldn’t feel them the way you’d felt them before. She would learn. She went downstairs. She went out the office door, closing it behind her, listening for the click of the lock. The world was still and the moon high and huge. She would go home now, and not think. She would put all of her effort into not thinking.
Heather started the car. Her breath frosted the windshield from the inside—empirical evidence that she existed. The steering wheel was freezing and she held it pinched between forefinger and thumb, her pinkies out in a posture of absurd gentility. She drove without intention, but the roads were clear and there were no other cars. The clock’s hour hand was fixed somewhere between eleven and twelve; there was no minute hand. The earth was unpopulated. Only the ends of sodden sticks and logs and rocks broke out of the snow. The white fields fell away behind her, and the few still, dark houses. Where was he now? she thought, forgetting that she was supposed to be not thinking. She took the stab of new pain that followed as her due. Her cold foot groped for the brake. She turned onto Sabbath Creek Road.
The house was black and silent. For one queer moment, she wished herself back—through the night and the great wall into that warm swirl of transient happiness—into the mill attic, even alone, even after he had left, because at least there lingered there some remnant of him, but here, in her own house, there would be nothing. She did not want to go inside. At least not yet.
So she walked out behind the house, her shoes packing down the brittle ridge of ice, sinking two, three inches into the dense powder beneat
h; she moved slowly down the hill of the back field, all the way down to the bottom, where the slope sank to the small pond, its muddy water frozen now the color of steel. The moon seemed to rain down bone-whiteness on the field, a bleached-out planetary light. It reminded her, with a jolt, of that night so long before when she had walked home to her dormitory across the college campus, having left her virginity behind in the bed of some sleeping fraternity brother. How much more had she left behind tonight, Heather thought, and yet, for the first time, she felt a kind of perverse virtue to her unencumbrance. She was light, too, after all, and stripped clean, purified by sadness. And alive. All around her, the snow slept beneath ice, the earth beneath snow, and below that, innumerable creatures—all sleeping, each dug into the dark, rolled tightly into themselves. All around her in their houses, people were sleeping, and even here, somehow under the muddy, half-frozen water, there were probably things not quite dead but sleeping.
She did not know how she had come to be the only person awake in the world, but if it could just stay this way, if they could all just stay asleep forever, it occurred to her that maybe it wouldn’t seem quite so insurmountable, this ordeal of keeping on living.
Later, Heather would rue this thought. She would blame herself, and entirely without reason. Pick, after all, had been dead for hours by that time, cold on the couch before the fireplace, which was also cold, her tangled fingers by now hopelessly unyielding. Upstairs in her crib, Polly was cold, too, and wet—the skin of her thighs already blossoming in raw red patches—and still sick, naturally, since her chesty cough had gone untreated and uncomforted for many hours. But mostly hungry. She was so hungry, in fact, that she had only recently fallen asleep after a long, ragged evening of crying.
The Sabbathday River Page 19