by Jamie Quatro
The boys leave anonymous notes in her mailbox, tokens of puppy love. I heart you, miss. You’re my favorite teacher. I like your hair. She is twenty-three, twenty-four, around her they can begin to imagine the men they will become. The bolder ones wait, in the mornings, just outside the door that opens onto the mansion’s main hallway. You smell good today, miss, they say when she emerges. You smell like fruit.
What is it, the invisible thing that makes boys and men want to be close to her? What Thomas calls, awkwardly, her uncorked-ness? You’re like a just-opened bottle of fine wine, Thomas says. She possesses, a friend tells her, an exterior softness: there is no protective shell, she trusts everyone, finds everyone interesting, is honest to a fault. Raised in love, money, and the certainty of God’s favor—money the indication of God’s favor, an idea so insidious she won’t recognize it till she’s in her forties. She has never been broken up with, or betrayed, has never seen anyone die. All the eagerness and desire of her youth were fixed in time by the marriage; the wedding sealed off the potential for the kinds of letdowns others absorbed—failed relationships, cheating boyfriends. The fact of her early marriage ensured she would stay, for a space of many years, desirable. A woman becomes more attractive as she ages only if she’s married, a male professor once told her. It means you have something another man wanted, and still wants. It’s single women who don’t age well.
The youngest boys come to visit in the evenings. They want to talk about their parents and siblings and friends at home. Sometimes they’re so homesick they cry. She isn’t supposed to touch them but she does, she’s a believer in the Big Hug, can feel the tension leaving their limbs. Surrogate parent—shouldn’t it be part of the job?
One evening before Christmas break, a sixth-grade boy named Nathan knocks on their door. He comes into the kitchen, shuffling his feet and looking all around, soft blond hair on his forehead like a swirl of cake frosting. He unlids the matryoshka dolls on her counter and sets them out—fat Santa within fat Santa—each one holding a different object. Bell, cake, miniature decorated tree. For a long time he doesn’t speak.
How are exams going? she says to break the silence.
I need to tell you something, he says.
He sits on the rug in front of the kitchen cupboards, cross-legged, as if it’s circle time in preschool. She does the same.
The older boys, he says. Sometimes they have these, like, contests?
He’s looking at her, anguished, desperate for her to understand.
Contests, she says.
Like, to see how far they can—you know. Make it go.
In her mind she’s searching. Spitting tobacco? Peeing off balconies?
Mostly they do it to themselves, Nathan says. But Hank does it to some of the younger boys. He, like, demonstrates.
His voice cracks, and something in the way he keeps flipping his hair and in the softness of his cheek skin, the delicate way he opens and closes his lips—she understands.
And Hank did this to you, she says.
I asked him to, Nathan says. The words come out like a growl. He begins to cry, great noisy sobs. She sits beside him and puts an arm around his shoulders. He leans in and lays his head against her chest.
When Thomas gets home he finds them there, sitting on the floor.
Hey, Thomas says. What’s up?
Nathan stands. I want to go home, he says.
Thomas is the one who goes with Nathan to the headmaster, Thomas the one who drives him to the airport in Newark and sits with him at the gate and tells him, over and over: It’s okay, no one blames you, your parents will love you no matter what.
Years later their own sixth-grade son will kiss a girl in the preteen club on a cruise, and she’ll remember Nathan, his soft wet eyelashes; how that evening, sitting on the floor in her kitchen, leaning against her, he put his hand beneath her breast, cupping, as if to test his own internal response system. How she allowed it for one second, and then gently, firmly pushed the hand away. He’d be in college now. Maybe the touch was a parting gesture to the hypothetical world of women; maybe it was simply a comfort. Either way, she doesn’t regret allowing it.
May 2017
Dear James,
Another journal entry, another letter I’ll never send. Like praying into the void. God of God, Light of Light, Very Void of Very Void—do you remember the day we went to the museum? The first day of the conference in Chicago, when we were still trying to pretend. There was a room in the contemporary wing with a film playing on loop, paper marionettes in silhouette. In the background, hanging from a tree, was a black man with a noose around his neck, his body swaying back and forth; in the foreground, the nude midsection of a white man with an erection. A succession of black females approached, knelt, and put their mouths on it. Over and over they moved their paper heads up and down until the white man shoved them away. None of them good enough. He ended up finishing himself while some kind of elated field music played, banjos and trumpets.
We sat on the bench and watched, the only two in the room. I was frozen between the horror of the imagery and the thrill of your body beside me in the dark. Watching that physical act on the screen made it impossible not to think of it with you. What would you have done, had I turned, as I wanted to, and kissed the smooth place on your neck just beneath your ear? Or placed my hand on your chest to feel the soft pectorals beneath your shirt, the contrast to Thomas’s definition? (Another source of my arousal, the fusion of masculine and feminine in the shape of your body.) Did you sense what a thin membrane separated my thought from action? Perhaps you did, perhaps that’s the reason you stood, abruptly, and left. In the gallery outside you were facing the mirrored wall, and when I came out, I saw you see me in reflection: the down, up brush of your eyes. As if you finally allowed yourself to look at more than just my face because in reflection I was at one remove from reality. Same purse of your lips and backward tilt of your head, that pleased expression I can’t explain. Was it aesthetic pleasure only—something in my shape, or clothing, or the way I walked? Or was it—as I thought then, and still think now—ownership? As much of you as my retina can hold, and electrify, and send along the optic nerve to my visual cortex—exactly this much of you belongs to me.
The all-important gaze. I think it’s the moment you knew I would bend. You sensed the perversely submissive thing inside me—I wanted pain from your hand, yours alone. Looking at me, in the mirror, you brought it into being. Wave function collapse: in taking my measurement all probabilities spiked to a single outcome. And you would do more than expose the desire, you would ravage it and walk away and I wouldn’t try to stop you, or want you to stop. I also knew the crucial thing: you wouldn’t act. You felt, and saw me feel back, saw that I was powerless, and decided to withhold. You, like Thomas, are a good man. A man who honors long-standing commitment. I saw you decide to go on being that man.
When I approached you took three steps away, in case I crossed a line. Which I would have, with the slightest nod of your head. I was a fucking wreck that day.
Later, in the park, we sat on another bench. So warm out, unseasonable, my feet were swelling in my heels. When I took them off I was startled for a moment by the color of my toenails, painted electric blue. I’d forgotten. We were talking about God and theology (the delight, the utter joy of speaking with someone who shared the language of my childhood). We discussed sullied words like perfection, how it has retained its original sense—a property of something that has been completed—only in music (perfect cadence) and grammar (perfect tense). We discussed the ontological versus cosmological arguments for the existence of God, and whether the universe exists in esse, like a house (deism, Aristotle) or in fieri, liquid in a vessel (theism, Aquinas). And St. John of the Cross, how he said we might become sexually aroused in the middle of spiritual acts, such as prayer, or communion, because when the spirit is moved to pleasure it drags the body up with it. We’re holistic creatures, it cannot be helped.
What a grac
ious thing to have written, you said.
And you spoke of your father, who’d just passed away. He was a jazz musician, and the way he thrashed his limbs in the final hours looked as if he were trying but failing to suss out a drum rhythm.
He taught me to tie my own flies, you said, and I remember noticing how small his hands were. I inherited them. I’ve always been embarrassed by them.
You held a hand out to show me; I pressed my palm against it, the tips of my fingers an inch above yours.
An intimate conversation, comfortable. Familial, even, as if we were siblings. When I leaned over and put my head in your lap, did you know it wasn’t a premeditated move? My body simply went there of its own volition. I wanted something. Not sexual.
Rest, maybe. I wanted to be at rest with you.
I closed my eyes and felt your hand on my forehead.
We cannot allow this, you said. We will not allow it.
Of course not, I said.
And yet: to sit up, I had to push, hard, against the downward force of your hand.
Shut it down, says Head.
Continue on, says Heart.
Deluded Heart, you’ll only make a mess.
Deluded Head, any mess will be worth it.
You will watch fire consume everything you care about. You will be left with ash—the proper and only end of any burning.
Think of Moses. His vision in the desert. A bush on fire yet unconsumed.
Think of Letters of John Newton: the burning bush is an emblem applicable to the state of a Christian when she is in the fire of temptation. Think of Job, the true cause of his uncommon sufferings. Think how the experiment played upon him answered many good purposes: Job was humbled yet approved; his friends were instructed; the wisdom and mercy of the Lord, in his darkest dispensations, were gloriously—
Job is bullshit. Job lost everything.
Who are we to question God’s ways, says Head. Who are you—
I want what I want, says Heart.
When Kate is two and Tommy a newborn, Maggie’s rich uncle—her father’s older brother, who never married—passes away, leaving his nieces and nephew a million dollars apiece. Thomas quits his job and they move to Nashville so he can start his MBA at the Owen School. They buy a house in Franklin, a subdivision eager to proclaim its connection to the pastoral: Maple Creek Farms. The houses are situated amid rolling hills and small lakes, a running and bike trail along a creek in the woods.
I think we should have them baptized, Maggie says one Sunday afternoon.
They’ve started attending a Presbyterian church, liberal, liturgical: robes, choir, stained glass. The kind of services Thomas doesn’t mind. Short sermons, the subdued administration of the Lord’s Supper once a month; infant baptisms, formal, with a tiny clear bowl into which the minister dips three fingers, then places them on the child’s head. They’d seen a baptism that morning, a set of newborn twins.
Isn’t Kate a little old? Thomas says.
My parents keep saying they want us to have them dedicated, next time we come home, she says. This is a way to avoid it.
Sure. I’m just surprised we haven’t discussed it.
Her parents’ church is an embarrassment to both of them: drums and electric guitars, flashing laser lights and images projected onto screens during the sermon, Madonna-and-child cloud formations in distant galaxies—the whole performance. And the constant talk of the second coming, the Israel-watching. They need their own state, they need to rebuild the temple, America needs to help them keep what is rightfully theirs. When she was growing up the threat of Jesus’s return was fused with the threat of nuclear war; she used to dream of a mushroom cloud blooming over the mountains. Her own children, she thinks, will have God without dread.
She invites her parents to Nashville for the service, but they can’t come, or won’t; she can’t tell. Tommy wears a gown and sleeps in Thomas’s arms; Kate wears a new pink dress with a smocked chest. She keeps lifting and lowering the skirt, hiding her eyes, exposing to the congregation her new striped undies.
Father, name your child, the minister says.
Katherine Margaret Ellmann.
Katherine Margaret, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. May the blessing of God Almighty be upon you.
Kate looks up at the minister, mouth open, blond curls on her forehead dark with water. The minister gathers Tommy into his arms. Thomas Maxwell Ellmann Junior. The minister repeats the blessing while the baby sleeps, pacifier quivering. And then the part of the ceremony Maggie loves: the minister carries Tommy up and down the aisles, she and Thomas following behind, Thomas carrying Kate, while the congregation sings the doxology. Maggie notices people wiping tears.
Afterward they stand in the foyer, as is the custom on baptismal Sundays, so the congregants can extend the right hand of fellowship. So happy to have you here. Such beautiful children. What a lovely family.
I see why you like it, Thomas says on the way home. Church. The sense of community. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll join.
You know it doesn’t matter to me, she says.
Yeah it does. It’s a huge part of your life.
Well, it doesn’t have to be part of yours.
Thomas reads to Kate before bed. Together they linger over pages. Can you find the kitten? Can you find the clock? Where’s Goldbug? In the bedroom across the hall Maggie nurses the baby, listening for the soft pock of her daughter’s thumb each time she pulls it from her mouth to point. She notices the way Thomas forms gentle edges around certain words: chirp, basket, clatter. A good father. She is lucky to be married to such a man.
When Kate is tucked in and she’s finished nursing, Thomas takes the sleeping baby and places him, on his side, in a wedge-shaped prop in the bassinet. He remembers which direction the baby faced the previous night and alternates sides, to facilitate the development of an evenly shaped head—something she’d read in a parenting book and mentioned to him, once. Thomas remembers things like that. The way she likes her sheets tucked in tight, and how to separate the laundry, not just colors from whites but also linens from clothing, and how she likes her coffee, cream poured into the mug first and preheated, for twenty-three seconds, in the microwave.
After the children are asleep she brushes her teeth and leaves the water running, then sits on the closed toilet lid and breathes, trying to keep the boxed-in feeling from coming over her. It comes anyhow. She pictures scenes from sexy movies they’ve watched together: a heavy breast hanging above a waiting mouth, women tongue-kissing men, women tongue-kissing women. Nothing. She cannot manufacture arousal.
You love him, she tells herself. If he asks—when he asks—he’s only asking you to love him like a normal wife.
But the panic overtakes her, the long pause between heartbeats, pressure in her chest before the rapid-fire beating and all-over sweat, her vision narrowing at the peripheries. On the other side of the door, in their bed, Thomas is waiting.
She comes into the room and turns away to change into her nightshirt.
Let me watch you, Thomas says. You’re so beautiful with those breasts. Come to bed like that.
And she tells him, again, that the milk leaks, she’s embarrassed about her still-soft stomach, she feels more attractive with less exposed.
I’ll just look. You can put your shirt back on when we’re done.
When we’re done. And now the calculating, the series of ifs and thens she must go through, the urgency increasing with every night that passes since the last time they had intercourse. If she puts on the nightshirt now, after he’s asked her to leave it off, he will roll over and turn out the light and go silent. If she says I’m sorry or Maybe tomorrow, he’ll say Don’t worry about it.
But when she opens her book, or turns on her lamp, he’ll begin.
Why don’t you want me anymore? Why can’t I turn you on? It used to be easy.
And she will once again try to convince him that it’s her fault, not his. Two babies, she�
�ll say. Nursing hormones. I’m exhausted.
So stop nursing, he’ll say. It’s been four months. I want you back.
But she isn’t ready to stop, she wants to breast-feed a full year. She cannot explain the desire to keep nursing, only that it’s as insistent as an instinct. They will argue until it’s time for her to get up and nurse again.
If she leaves the shirt off and comes to bed he will assume, because of this assent, that she would like him to get her there. He’ll try things, tentative at first, gentle. And she will either pretend to enjoy what he’s doing (what harm in pretending; as long as he comes, as long as she appears to come, they can both get a good night’s sleep) or not pretend. If she decides not to pretend, he will either roll over and go silent or jerk off in front of her, his eyes on her breasts. He might put a finger inside before closing his eyes and disappearing into himself.
Or—the worst nights, the ones she’s preparing herself for, in the bathroom—he will become someone she doesn’t recognize.
Fuck this, he’ll say when she gets into the bed with her shirt on. I want to be inside you, I’m your fucking husband—and he will shove her onto her side, then onto her stomach, the weight of his body pressing her into the mattress.
What is the least damaging path? Her body isn’t hers anyhow, a toddler and an infant attached like appendages. If she allows this—if she breathes through it till it’s over—they’ll avoid a fight. She’ll get some sleep. And her pain is a private one. Really, she thinks, what is pain in this case? Discomfort is the word for what her body feels. The pain is spiritual, a chink in her soul each time she allows him to penetrate, after all the refusals. But isn’t it a loving thing, in the end, to give him this? A soul-enriching thing, to satisfy a husband, a good man and father who has never intentionally hurt her, or anyone?