by John Barth
So we argued, and I worried, and he drank too much and got either abusive or weepy or comatose. Finally I told him he had to see a shrink about the alcohol, and we’d do marriage counseling together about our sexual problems. At first he refused: There was no problem, except my frigidity. Then he agreed—but to the sex counseling only, and only after we were pregnant. He’d got the idea that having a baby would solve our problems; he actually told me that motherhood would make me feel more like a woman, when the truth was that fatherhood would make him feel more like a man. He was also beginning to think about running for Congress, and he wanted the family image for his campaign.
I said Absolutely not, and laid down the law: six months on the wagon and joint sex therapy over at Johns Hopkins, where there was a counselor Jack Bass trusted. If we felt good about our marriage at the end of that time, we’d try for pregnancy. Poonie got so furious—and so drunk—that for the first time he raised his arm to hit me. I threatened to leave him if he did, and that night I refused to sleep in our bed with him: another first. He turned on the tears, and we made an appointment with the shrink for the following week.
Poon obviously sensed that he had deep problems. He felt so relieved at the step we’d taken that for one whole evening he was perfectly charming. He drank straight tonic water; he was witty at the dinner table, the way he’d always used to be. We put records on after dinner and danced on our patio, and for the first time in our married life we made love like a normal couple: affectionate foreplay followed by a solid fuck. I even had myself a little orgasm, which I pretended was a big one, and fell asleep afterward in his arms. That made him feel so good about himself that he slipped out of bed and downstairs to the bar and drank himself into a stupor.
When I found him down there toward morning, I told him that was it: We’d made a big mistake and had better unmake it and get on with our separate lives before things got worse. I would pack some stuff and get out while he was at the office; we’d work out the details later. Poonie begged me to forgive him once again; he’d been so excited at taking a step forward that he’d let himself slip two steps back. I told him I did forgive him, but didn’t want to be his wife. I hoped he’d get help with his booze problem and find himself a partner more to his taste.
So he got ugly and called me things. Then he calmed down and agreed that I was right to leave, but hoped we could straighten ourselves out. Then he phoned from the office, all choked up, and begged me to stay; he said he was afraid of himself, what he might do or turn into. He’d never talked like that before. I quit mooning over our wedding gifts and started collecting my stuff in a hurry to get out of there and down to Nopoint Point.
But I didn’t make it. Centreville is a tiny town, reader: The offices of Baldwin and Baldwin were five minutes from our house. I had hardly got my suitcases out of the attic when his car came up the driveway, and I heard Poonie come in the side door and start banging things around downstairs at the bar. Oh boy, I thought. I was up in our bedroom, still in my nightgown, with clothes and luggage spread all over the bed. I thought to call the police, but it’s harder to bring yourself to do that in a small town than it is in the city, where you don’t know all the cops by name. Anyhow, the chances were that the most I was in for was more tears and name-calling. My main concern was to get out of that nightgown and into street clothes.
I heard him start upstairs, grumbling to himself, so I pulled off the nightgown and popped into underpants and a skirt, and I couldn’t find my damn bra so I grabbed a blouse and was just buttoning it up when Poonie came in like a refugee from a Eugene O’Neill play: necktie loose, hair messed up, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and an ugly little pistol in the other, that I didn’t even know he owned. Good old America.
He asked me where I thought I was going. I turned my back on him and started tucking in my blouse. He actually fired a shot—through one of the suitcases and the bed, it turned out, and into the bedroom floor. The bang was so loud I jumped. Poonie stood between me and the telephone with a surprised grin on his face, looking at the pistol. There was actually gunsmoke in the room! I said That does it, Poonie, and ran around him to the phone. I think he was a little dazed; he didn’t stop me at first—but I didn’t know the police number, so I had to ring the operator. Before she answered, Poonie put down the bottle and snatched at the phone, and when I wouldn’t let go he yanked out the jack and wrestled me down on the bed on top of all my spread-out clothes and put the pistol to my neck.
If a stranger had broken into the house and done that, I’d have been too scared to resist. But this was my old pal Poonie Baldwin, that I’d grown up with! Gun or no gun, I kicked and hollered and slammed him around the face with the telephone until he gave me a whack upside the head with the flat of his pistol. It shocked and hurt me so much that I rolled over onto my stomach and wailed. Maybe I thought he’d apologize then, the way he always did when he went too far. Instead, he tied my wrists behind me with the telephone cord and raped me.
Strictly speaking, what he did was force me against my will; in those days it was still legally impossible for a woman to be raped by her husband. Once he had my hands tied, he pulled my skirt and underpants off and turned me on my back and put the pistol to my neck again. I should’ve kicked and yelled like before; I didn’t really think he’d shoot me. But the side of my face hurt so much where he’d hit me, and I was so stunned and upset by the whole situation, I just bawled. Damn me for that!
Poonie drank another slug or two from the bottle and took his time getting his own pants off. Then he opened my legs and wet me with spit and fucked me in the missionary position: very uncomfortable with your hands behind your back and a Princess telephone under your shoulder-blades. As a rule the guy came fast, as if he were nervous about being in there in the first place. But the combination of flat-out sadism and Jack Daniel’s bourbon improved his staying power. He talked at me the whole time, and paused every now and then to take a left-handed swig from the bottle on the nightstand without withdrawing, while he held the gun to my throat or my forehead. He told me I was a frigid snob who needed loosening up. He told me he’d fucked a hundred women in his life and every one of them had been better in bed than I was. He accused me of accusing him of not being man enough for me, when the fact was I wasn’t woman enough for him. In fact I’d never said any such thing; it was his own insecurity talking. He still had his shirt and tie on: a maroon club tie I’d bought him in Easton just before we were married, when I was persuading myself that I loved him. It dangled in my face while he was raping and haranguing me, like a taunt to my bad judgment.
When he finally came and climbed off me, he kept up his tirade from a chair beside the nightstand. I was too miserable to say anything. The left side of my face hurt so much that I wondered if he’d broken something, and on top of my other worries his ejaculation reminded me that I was ovulating. On the rare occasions when it was needed in those days, I used a diaphragm, but that morning I’d stowed it in my suitcase, not expecting to need it again for quite a while.
I asked him please to undo my hands; the phone cord hurt, and I wanted to go douche and put an ice pack on my face. He said You and your douches; you’re always in a rush to wash me out of you. I told him this was no joke; he’d hurt me, and I was ovulating.
That was a mistake. Poonie started in about my refusing to have children with him: another example of my being too good for him, and he was damned fed up with that; I’d been lording it over him since we were kids, and from now on things were going to be different. If 1 didn’t give him what he wanted, he’d take it, et cetera.
He made me stay put and drank some more whiskey. He’d loved me all his life, he said, and I’d never really loved him back, and that’s why he drank too much and went to whores who’d give him what I wouldn’t, blah blah blah. Drunken postcoital schmaltz. Did you know that human sperm can be retained alive in the cervix for two or three days until an ovum comes along? But if the egg’s already in the
pipe, they can do their job in five minutes. Poonie made me lie still for half an hour, holding the gun on me and saying things like maybe having his baby would make a better woman out of me.
After a while he started fiddling with himself, and I thought Uh-oh. While he was doing that, he had to put the pistol down on the nightstand every time he picked up the Jack Daniel’s. If my hands had been free, I’d have made a go for the gun. Maybe I should’ve screamed bloody murder anyhow, but nobody would’ve heard me, and Poonie had enough liquor in him now to make me worry.
Hey: I forgot to mention that this was a beautiful late-winter morning: a little glaze of snow on the ground, and the trees glistening from a sleet storm the night before, and the bedroom full of sunshine. It broke my heart, what a huge mistake I’d made with my life. Poonie kept saying Princess Kate, too good for anybody; it was time he showed Miss Sherritt how to share it.
Well, I just lay there, sniffling and hurting and feeling sorry for myself, and when he ordered me down on my knees in front of his chair with my face in the blue shag wall-to-wall and my ass in the air, I guess I knew what was coming, but I got down there. He undid my wrists and made me spread my cheeks and greased me up with Vaseline from his nightstand drawer—I never knew he kept Vaseline in his nightstand drawer—and sure enough, he tried to bugger me, but his erection wasn’t hard enough to force me open. The anal sphincter is a mighty muscle, and it can have a mind of its own. So he used his thumb, to the hilt, and when that didn’t work I heard him scrabbling around in his nightstand drawer again. I was afraid he’d use the gun barrel, or the Jack Daniel’s bottle; I told him I was trying to relax for him, but just couldn’t do it.
He said We’ll see about that and stuck something slender and hard and pointy in there that made me cry out. He pushed it in and pulled it out a few times and then scared the bejesus out of me by putting the tip end of the gun there after all and telling me to open up for him or else. As if my ass was a safe-deposit box! But that did it, thank God, and the man got what he was after at last. He drove clear in and stayed there a few seconds while he scraped something across my back. I let out a yell, as much fright as pain, and he drove in again and came with such a groan you’d have thought he was the one getting hurt, and collapsed on top of me. Right away then he started crying, rolling us over onto one side and shmooshing his face into my hair and begging me to forgive him, and in his drunken remorse he made the mistake of letting go of the pistol while he hugged my shoulders.
There it was, on the rug, right in front of my eyes. I grabbed it and jumped away from him and tore out of that bedroom and downstairs to the other phone. Poonie got himself up and came after me, sort of wailing. I’d never held a pistol in my hand before, much less fired one, and for all I knew the thing didn’t have any more bullets in it; but I was in such a fury that when he followed me into the kitchen I shot at the floor in front of him and managed to nail him in the foot by mistake. It turns out that what actually happened was the bullet ricocheted off the quarry tile before it grazed the inside of his left heel; otherwise it would’ve done real damage. Poonie hollered and thrashed, and there was lots of blood, and I nearly fainted from shock.
But I didn’t. That gunshot cleared my head the way the one upstairs had stunned me. I changed my mind about calling the sheriff and got out the first-aid kit instead. It was Poonie who fainted, from shock and alcohol, while I put a bandage on his heel to stop the bleeding and saw that despite the mess I hadn’t much more than nicked him. By the time I had him bandaged up, he was breathing normally; he woke up enough to apologize all over himself again and then fell into a drunken sleep on the quarry tile. I put an afghan over him—our wedding gift from Molly Barnes—but I let him lie there bare-assed in his shirt and tie and blood while I telephoned Porter Baldwin, Senior, and my father and told them to come over, there was a sort of family emergency, and Dad to bring Jack Bass with him if he could, but not to say anything yet to Mom.
Mister Baldwin was there in ten minutes; it took nearly an hour for Dad to collect Doctor Jack and drive up from Easton. I turned up the thermostat to keep myself warm, but refused to put clothes on or set down the pistol till everybody was there. A mighty uncomfortable fifty minutes for Porter Senior. Did Peebie attack you, honey? Shouldn’t we get you both to the hospital? He didn’t want to stare at me, and he was plenty worried about the blood and the pistol and my beat-up face and Poonie’s bandaged foot. I told him I’d been attacked, all right, and his son would explain it when he woke up from his nap, and maybe I should make us all some coffee.
A main concern of fathers and fathers-in-law in these circumstances is to get the young lady’s clothes back on her and the firearms stashed away; but sorry as I felt for Mister Baldwin, I wouldn’t be rushed. When everybody was there, I told them what had happened and showed them the bullet holes upstairs and the ripped-out Princess phone on the rug and the bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the nightstand. Poonie was stirring by that time, so I let Doctor Jack wake him up and check out his foot, and I gave Daddy the pistol and told him and Mister Baldwin to ask Poon a few questions while Doctor Jack examined me: I wanted evidence for legal prosecution. We two went back up to the famous bedroom, and while Jack Bass poked around inside me, he told me he’d had his doubts about this marriage all right, even before the crab lice and my questions about anal intercourse, but he hadn’t wanted to be a killjoy. He confirmed that there was semen in both my vagina and my rectum, as well as green markings on my buns and my back. I told him what I’d felt down on that rug, but I didn’t put two and two together till we looked around on the floor and found a forest-green Crayola with blood and shit and Vaseline on it. I checked Poonie’s nightstand drawer; there was the Vaseline jar, with the top still off, but no crayon box. All Poonie wanted was the forest green.
For the first time in all this ruckus I felt embarrassed then, and a little ashamed of myself and sorry for Poonie Baldwin. I didn’t tell Jack Bass what had happened in Heather Foulke-Stoughton’s gazebo a hundred years before, but I asked him to hang onto that forest-green Crayola as evidence for the prosecution, and I put a robe around me at last, and we went downstairs, and I let myself cry a little when Daddy hugged me and Mister Baldwin fixed me an ice pack for my face.
Well, old Poon there was a pretty sick boy by that time, and a pretty sorry one. He’d been throwing up and making excuses and blaming me for not doing my wifely duty and blaming Willy and his parents for turning him into what he was. But Porter Senior was an old trial lawver, and Hank Sherritt was one very upset daddy, and the two of them got the truth out of him between upchucks. Jack Bass corroborated that I’d been sodomized and Crayola’d as well as beaten in the face and bound and raped—the men had seen those green marks on me already. But when I told them I was ready to talk to the police now, they clucked and hmmed and then explained to me that I could bring assault-and-battery charges if I was determined to, but not rape, since the attacker was my husband.
I was wild! Never mind that a jury might let Poonie off, though I couldn’t imagine why—but not to be able even to file the charges! I hauled up my robe and made them look at the marks on my ass again and told Jack Bass to show them that crayon, and I said You mean he can get away with this too? They were three uncomfortable gentlemen, but they explained that that would come under aggravated assault. I swore I was going to tell every detail to every newspaper and TV reporter who’d listen, and get the wretched laws changed; never mind anybody’s reputation, and Poonie could just forget about running for public office. They let me go on till I was ventilated, and they promised to stand by me whatever I decided and to testify if I wanted them to. But they hoped for everybody’s sake that I’d consider a quick and quiet divorce with a generous settlement instead of a big public fuss that would make life sticky for all of them, not just for Poonie, small towns being what they are.
That must be what I wanted to be talked into—all but the settlement. Give the money to a rape crisis center, I told them; g
ive it to some outfit for battered wives. I ended up not calling in the sheriff at all, much less pressing charges. I wouldn’t even take half the value of our house and furniture when the time came; I hadn’t paid for any of it, and the associations were all painful. Dad helped me finish packing my clothes, and I moved back home till I could get my bearings. I told Mom the story and let her scrub the crayon marks off me, so she wouldn’t feel left out. But I didn’t tell her or anybody else till you just now the real secret of the forest-green Crayola.
When the smoke cleared and the lawyers started talking, Poonie came to see me. He’d already apologized to Hank and Irma. He asked me what in the world he could do to get us back together again and straighten out his life before he went off the deep end for keeps. I told him I believed he really was sorry and really did love me in his way, but that our marriage had been a huge mistake all around, and nothing on earth would get us back together. I told him he was off the deep end already, in my opinion, though maybe not for keeps, and I advised him for his own and our families’ sake to move away from the Eastern Shore, as I was going to do for different reasons, and to get on the wagon and stay there, and to come off his scornfulness about dykes and faggots, because he sure had hang-ups of his own, and to consider some heavy shrinkage for his impulse to hurt women, but not to expect any fantastic results, and not for pity’s sake to run for public office till he got his private life in better shape. And if none of the above panned out, I advised him, he should seriously consider using that pistol of his on himself instead of on other people, for he was a miserable, worthless, dangerous sonofabitch as he was.