Difficult Women

by Roxane Gay

  They went to the Sahara Desert for their honeymoon, to do something good, Bianca said when Dean, her now ex-husband, asked why they should go to the end of the earth. From village to village, dancing children ran to greet them, held their fingers to the rain that suddenly appeared. Dark people with white bright teeth formed tight circles around Bianca. They painted her face, lifted her up on their shoulders. They said she was a god. When she left, there were high-pitched wails of sorrow. Then, the rain was gone and Dean and Bianca began their lives as a married couple.

  On the drive home, Bianca opened the sunroof, looked into the setting sun. Long after she pulled into her assigned space, she sat in her car looking up at angry rain clouds forming, following. For dinner, she ate pasta with a little butter and cheese, had three glasses of red wine. Above her, the ceilings groaned, swollen with the weight of water. Some nights she lay on her couch and stared up, studying the concatenations of water stains, the new forms her ceiling was taking, the way the panels undulated when her upstairs neighbors crossed from one room to another. When she grew tired, she crawled into her empty bed, lay on her side, traced the slight indentation where her ex-husband used to sleep. “This is my life,” she said to the empty room. “I am grateful.” Then she tried to master faith.

  Dean couldn’t handle the watery rot that followed Bianca. It was too much, the falling water, the decay everywhere. On their last night, as they made love, Dean on his back, holding Bianca’s ass in his hands, enjoying the way her body curved into him, as she rocked against him and moaned softly, as he said the final I love you he would ever say, he suddenly opened his eyes and could only see past his beloved wife, past the flat of her stomach and the gentle rise of her breasts and the lustrous black hair framing her face, to the decomposing darkness above them. His cock immediately grew limp. He felt all the strength he had ever possessed seep from his pores. Bianca moaned louder, stopped moving, planted her hands against his chest. “What’s wrong?” she asked. She kissed his chin, nipped at his lower lip with her teeth, tickled his neck. He pushed her away. Even though he had no strength left, he was not gentle. She fell off the bed onto the damp floor. The next morning, Dean was gone. He took nothing with him but the mold spores growing in his lungs. If she were prone to the maudlin, Bianca would admit that he also took her heart.

  When Bianca was only three days old, her mother noticed a small water stain in the corner of the nursery, just above the crib. She thought nothing of it. She held her beautiful baby with a thick head of black hair and clear blue eyes, swaying side to side, singing silly songs. She kissed the soft spot of Bianca’s head and inhaled the sweetness. The older Bianca got, the more the stain grew, until it had consumed the entire ceiling in a mural of black mold. A contractor was called. Her parents explained that there was a leak, that there was something unknown somewhere. An exhaustive search for the source of the damage was conducted. Nothing was found. The ceiling was replaced.

  Bianca continued to grow, and new stains formed, traveling across the nursery ceiling late at night in deep arcs. After the third time they replaced the ceiling, her parents gave up. It was their daughter or their sanity, their marriage. They took Bianca to the orphanage on the edge of town, left her on the concrete steps with a note tucked inside her sweater. Bianca cried for four days after they left; not a soul could console her. The only picture Bianca has from her childhood is one the nuns took on her second day at the orphanage. In the picture, she’s three years old. Sister Mary Angelica is holding her. Her chubby arms stretch out at angles, her tiny fingers curled into tight fists. Her cheeks are bright with anger, slick with tears. Her eyes and mouth are red, wide open.

  Bianca agreed to go on a date with Dean, who worked in the law firm a few floors below her office, only after he began leaving her handwritten notes on her desk each morning. He wrote her lovely, whimsical things. He had perfect penmanship. He told her all the things he loved about her and he used that word—love—without any self-consciousness. When she finally gave in to his advances, she suggested an outdoor café. As they ate and smiled at each other dark clouds circled above their table. She could feel raindrops on her shoulders. In the near distance, there was sunlight. “That’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Dean said.

  By the end of the meal, they were teasing each other with their feet. He traced the fine knuckles of her hand with his fingers and smiled, never looked away. He asked if they might retire to her place for an after-dinner drink. Bianca paled and Dean stammered an apology for being so forward. “No,” Bianca said. “It’s not that. My place is a mess.” As he drove her home, they passed a park. She squeezed his shoulder. “Pull over here.” Dean grinned and pulled into the empty parking lot. Bianca slipped out of her shoes and ran across the wide expanse of grass to the merry-go-round.

  There had been a playground at the orphanage. She often played there, alone. The other children were frightened of her, as were most of the nuns who tried to love her as one of God’s children but failed. Priests from far away were brought in to examine her, to anoint her with holy water. They all said the same thing. Whatever plagued her was the work of the devil and his demons. Whatever possessed her was more powerful than their God. Sermons were delivered about her, about this child who was followed by water and decay. Bianca still managed to grow up a happy child. She would grab hold of a metal rail on the merry-go-round and run as fast as she could. She would run until the ground moved with her and the wind would start whipping the clouds. As the raindrops started to fall, she’d jump onto the merry-go-round and work her way to the middle. She would sit in the middle and throw her arms back, her face open to the wet sky.

  “I haven’t been on one of these in years,” Bianca said, walking around the contraption slowly, touching each of the handrails. Carefully, she climbed into the center. Dean began turning her around and around. She closed her eyes, reached up into the cool night breeze. When his arms grew sore, Dean stopped spinning and climbed onto the metal platform, still turning slowly. He knelt between Bianca’s thighs and she began unbuttoning his shirt. When they were both naked, Bianca lay back, enjoying the sensation of the metal grooves against her skin. Dean kissed her forehead and her eyelids and her lips. He tasted like wine and salt and he smelled clean. He marveled at the dampness of her skin, and licked droplets of water from the hollow of her neck. Then he was inside her, and he was her first and his mouth was hot against her ear, whispering all the lovely things he had written in his letters. He said I love you for the first time. She said it back. A warm rain began to fall on their naked bodies. Dean held Bianca’s face between his hands, gently moved the long strands of her hair aside. As she looked into his eyes, and her body opened to him completely, she hoped.

  The Mark of Cain

  My husband is not a kind man and with him, I am not a good person.

  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and he, Caleb, is kneeling over me, his fingers tracing my neck. I place my hands over his, the rough skin, the swollen knuckles. I squeeze.

  I wear heavy eyeliner and dark lipstick because my husband once said that he always wants me to look the way I did the night we met in a bar, drunk and numb, looking for trouble before it found us. He can’t stand to see me any other way, he said. He wasn’t being nostalgic.

  I worry about the day when he leaves me, torn apart on our bed, waiting for him to put me back together again.

  My husband has an identical twin, Jacob. Sometimes they switch places for days at a time. They think I don’t know. I am the kind of woman who doesn’t mind indulging the deception. My husbands have a father who was neither a good father nor a kind man. When he died, shot in the head by a woman he had beaten one time too many, Jacob and Caleb, then fifteen, immediately forgave their father his trespasses—the drinking, his meaty fists against their young bodies, the way he rid them of their mother. With each passing year, the brothers rewrote their past until they had beatified their father’s memory. They each have a tattoo of their fa
ther’s likeness on their back. The ink, Caleb told me on our first date, was mixed with their father’s ashes so he would always be with them.

  It is nearly impossible to tell Caleb and Jacob apart. They have the same physique, the same haircut, the same mannerisms. Neither of them snores. They are both left-handed. They have dark hair, blue eyes, long, sharp faces, high cheekbones. My husbands work together at the architecture firm they started, so whether it is Caleb or Jacob who comes home, they have the same story to tell me about their day. I married Caleb but I prefer Jacob’s company. When Jacob and I make love, there is a sorrowful kindness to his touch. I never worry about being left asunder.

  Jacob has a girlfriend, Cassie, who is really Caleb’s girlfriend. She is unaware of the distinction. The four of us are at dinner. Jacob, pretending to be Caleb, and I are holding hands. Caleb, pretending to be Jacob, and Cassie are holding hands. There is a light in his eyes that isn’t there when he looks at me. My husbands are finishing each other’s sentences, regaling Cassie and me with stories about a particularly difficult client. Jacob orders another bottle of wine, and we continue to drink and talk and practice being normal. His arm is heavy across my shoulders and every once in a while, he leans in and brushes his wet lips against the spot on my neck that makes my back arch sharply. Then he smiles at his brother and his brother smiles back. This is when they are at their best—when they are together, sharing the same moment. There is safety, for them, in the number two.

  Cassie is a graduate student in museum studies. Caleb told me this in bed after she and Jacob first started dating. He told me about how Cassie plans to curate modern art exhibits, how she has a unique aesthetic, how he thinks she may be the one for Jacob, but what he’s really telling me is that she’s the one for him. I lay next to Caleb, let him talk, traced his father’s image with my fingernails. I told him I was happy for Jacob but I was really happy for him.

  When it’s time to settle the check, Cassie and I go to the bathroom and we eye each other in the mirror as we freshen our lipstick. “It must be hard being married to a twin,” she says. I start to think that she may be smarter than I thought. I say, “It’s like being married to two men.”

  Jacob takes me home while Caleb takes Cassie to Jacob’s house, five houses down from ours. In the middle of the night, they will switch places and I will know because Caleb will smell like another woman. Cassie won’t notice because she is the kind of woman who doesn’t pay attention to details or who chooses not to pay attention to details. On the drive home, I trace Jacob’s knuckles and the tiny scars on his fingers, all from architecture school, making miniature models of grand ideas with sharp knives. I tell him how I wish every night could be like this night. He nods and says, “Let’s go for a drive.” I lean back in my seat, kick off my heels. Jacob takes me to the site of a project he’s working on, and we take the construction elevator to the top floor, his arms wrapped tightly around me as the hoist slowly creaks upward. There’s no ceiling yet on the top floor, so when we get out of the elevator, it is disorienting, seeing the city sprawling around us and nothing keeping us from falling into it.

  I hold on to Jacob to steady myself and then I laugh and pull him into a slow waltz, staring up into the night sky. When we stop, the world keeps spinning, so we drop to the concrete floor and sit with our knees pulled against our chests. What I want to say is that I know who he is and that I would choose him, I would always forever choose him, but I also know his first love is his brother, so I say nothing. I pull my shirt over my head and slide out of my skirt and I lie back on the cold floor, gritty with dirt and sawdust. I reach for Jacob and sigh when he lies on top of me. We kiss, softly, and he closes his eyes, blowing air along my neck, across my shoulders. Then I’m tearing off his shirt, pulling him against me, opening myself to him the way he wants me to. I tell him the only true thing I can. I say, “I love you.”

  When Caleb drinks too much, where too much is anything more than one drink, he forgets the new history he and his brother have cobbled from their memories of their father. After he and Jacob have switched places, Caleb climbs into bed reeking of wine and cigarette smoke. He barks at me to wake up. I pull the sheets over my head because I am thinking about Jacob and the freedom of tall buildings, and falling into stars while the husband I love most is moving over and in me. Caleb pulls the sheets away, turns on the lights. I sit up, shivering, alone with the husband I do not love most.

  He starts telling me a story about himself and his brother sitting in the backseat of their father’s Cadillac while the old man got a blowjob from a woman who was not their mother, and how their father had that woman give his sons blowjobs as well. As he tells me this story, his voice grows coarser. His features become less recognizable. Caleb grabs me by my waist, straddles me, and slaps my face. “Don’t ever do something like that,” he says. “Don’t be a fucking whore.” Then he’s flipping me onto my stomach, his unkind hand planted against my skull, holding me to the bed, treating me like the whore he doesn’t want me to be. I think about Caleb’s cock, slick with Jacob’s seed. I think about how much I hate and therefore love the husband I’m with because I pity him and maybe I pity myself. I come immoderately. Caleb falls asleep lying on top of me. His body is heavy and damp, his smell unfamiliar.

  In the morning, Caleb and I avoid making eye contact. He showers, pretends he’s going to work, goes to his brother’s house, sends Jacob back to me. I am at my dressing table, trying to mask the angry purpling bruise spreading across my face. Jacob stands in the doorway and smiles so kindly that I become nauseated. “What are you doing?” he asks. Then he notices the arc of broken blood vessels beneath my eye. His hands clench into tight fists as he approaches me. When he places soft kisses along the edges of the hurt, my face starts to ache more deeply than it ever did beneath Caleb’s fist. “I’m so sorry,” Jacob says, shouldering the burden of his brother’s sins.

  When I miss my period twice in a row, it is Jacob who finds me in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, wrapped in a bath towel, holding the pregnancy test in one hand. He falls to his knees, folds his hands over my thighs. He smiles, pulls my towel open, leaving me naked, and rests his face against my breasts. I run my fingers through his hair, gently massaging his scalp. I imagine the two of us packing a small suitcase, buying a cheap car, driving west on I-80 until we reach something better. I say, “Do you think your brother will be happy?” He says, “I don’t give a damn what my brother thinks.” For a while, I allow myself to believe him.

  I am six months pregnant when Caleb goes to a doctor’s appointment with me. He is moody, almost indifferent, there only because Jacob had a meeting he had to attend. These days, I mostly see Caleb late at night, when he steals back to his own home, when he is angry and needs something only I can give. He sits in the chair with the hard plastic arms next to the exam table, arms crossed tightly across his chest. As the doctor glides the sonogram wand across the lower round of my belly, she turns a knob on the machine. “Do you hear that?” she asks. The room is silent but for the identical flutters of two heartbeats.

  Difficult Women

  Loose Women

  Who a Loose Woman Looks Up To

  Never her mother. She is trying to kill her mother or, at least, those parts of her mother lurking beneath her skin. When she spreads her legs she hopes the distance between her and her mother will gape ever wider. She does this because she remembers too much; she has seen too much—her mother pale and frail, cowed by the meat of her father, his fleshy body, his fleshy demands.

  Where a Loose Woman Lives

  Her apartment is clean and bright and well appointed though her home doesn’t look lived in. There are the suggestions of life, but nothing more. She never stays in one place long. She doesn’t need to. When gentlemen visit, their deep voices echo throughout all the clean and bright and empty space. There is a print, black and white, in the hall entrance. Sometimes as he’s leaving, a gentleman caller will study the print, try to make
sense of it. She will watch him, standing nearby, her body wrapped in a soft robe. He’ll say, “This is beautiful, but what does it mean?” She will simply smile.

  How a Loose Woman Longs to Be Touched

  There was a boy she once knew. She was twenty-three and he was the same age. He was earnest and she didn’t know what to make of that. She had already learned the dangers of sincerity. He told her exactly how he felt. He asked her what she wanted. He touched her with purpose, his hands soft but strong. When she lay beneath him, she arched into his chest willingly, loved the warmth at the places where their bodies met. It was too much. She didn’t dare trust it. She broke his heart. When she closes her eyes, she remembers his fingers, tracing the bones of her spine.

  How a Loose Woman Sits at the Bar

  Smooth is what they call an ultra lounge—lots of low leather seating, dim lights, overpriced drinks. Electronica blasts through the speakers at uncomfortable volumes and there is a dress code, particularly for men, so they always wear their best jackets, sometimes a tie. Their shoes are slick and shiny, just like their hair. They have job titles that often end in the letters -er. Sometimes she goes to the lounge with people who might be considered friends though they know very little about her. She sits where she can be seen while maintaining an indifference about who actually sees her. She crosses her legs and keeps her calves touching. She doesn’t blink. She tries not to make it seem like she cares about anything at all.