After this he got off me. Zipped himself up. He still had his shoes on and his socks, and when he ran his fingers through his hair, smoothing it back, the glint from one of his cufflinks stayed caught in my eye.
He hadn’t even had to roll up his sleeves, and from this I thought about Ingrid the other night in the bathtub and how I couldn’t quite understand her. Him still in his cufflinks persuaded me that’d been a lie. That I knew exactly and had known it then. Only I hadn’t wanted to admit it and I was beginning to see how this sort of refusal on my part – this unwillingness to admit to things stronger than me – didn’t keep me from trouble but kept leading me to it.
Six
I lay there and waited. He’d left the room, left me tied, and I couldn’t undo the knot so I waited.
I didn’t sleep. The pull to close my eyes wasn’t there anymore now that I needed it. The belt was thin so it cut into my neck and my wrists. Now and then I tried halfheartedly to untie myself, knowing I couldn’t and that it hurt to try.
I wanted Ingrid to come get me and at the same time the last thing I wanted was for her to see me this way – laying here still naked and still tied, and with his come all over my face and my neck and my chest. I don’t know what I thought it said about me. I think I was more concerned with what it said about her. Not wanting to show her herself, which maybe was also part of his game. Making her be the one to clean up after him.
I heard nothing from downstairs. Nothing at all. I could’ve gotten up. It’s not like he’d tied my legs. But they still wouldn’t move. Like that part of me slept while the rest of me stayed wide awake.
My chest heaved as if still carrying his weight. My shoulders ached. But my wrists and neck hurt more and different. I traded them off. Rested my shoulders until I couldn’t stand it and had to rest my neck instead.
Ingrid did come in. She turned the light out as soon as she saw me, and which of us she was sparing, I couldn’t know. For a moment when she sat down near me I feared her terribly. Feared her more than him. And when she touched my hands, moving them to get at his knot, I jerked away. I made a sound I didn’t recognize. A whimpering I didn’t believe could come from my body.
She quieted me. She stroked my arms until they rested, making some slack for her to work with. Once she had the knot undone, she slipped the shank through the buckle. Then she lifted my head a little to slide the belt away.
“Don’t,” I said when she started to get up.
“I’ll just be a minute. You’ll see.”
I watched her move across the room to the bathroom. She didn’t turn on the light in there either. I heard water running for a while and then she came back. Brought two towels, one of them wet.
She cleaned him off me, then she got more towels, some of these were wet too. She slipped one under my neck. The dampness took some sting from the cuts there. She wrapped another towel around my wrists. I rested my hands in my lap, liking how the coolness felt there, opening my legs to it, and she lay another towel across my thighs. She did all of this like she’d done it before – something I couldn’t let myself think about.
When she finished all this, I faded in and out. Woke once to her smoking a cigarette. When she saw I was awake she held it for me so I could have some. After that I slept the night.
I woke up achy. She’d taken away the towels but the pillow behind me was damp. I put my arms up to try and flip it over but they wouldn’t move in that way. Instead I slid over to her side. I wanted more blankets because I couldn’t get warm.
I was glad she wasn’t there but didn’t want her to have left entirely. I didn’t want to be thinking about him, but I was. I was trying to figure out what made last night any different. Whether the difference was in him or in me because this seemed to matter. It was something I wanted to ask her but I knew we’d never talk this way.
Later she brought coffee just like she had those other mornings, though it all seemed wrong in this room. She helped me sit up because I couldn’t do this alone and I began worrying what else I couldn’t do.
“He won’t be back for a while,” she said, handing me a cup. “What do you take in it? I can’t remember.”
This hurt my feelings and so I didn’t answer her. She poured some cream. Left off the sugar as if she remembered after all but didn’t want to admit it.
“You should leave while he’s gone.”
“I should,” I said. And that’s how it started.
She looked at me funny. Like no one had suggested this to her before or like she’d never thought it herself. Like she thought it all the time.
“Yes, you should,” she said, like that would be the end of it. She started to get up. I grabbed her wrist and pulled her back hard. Everything on the tray beside us spilled.
“Leave it,” I said when she started fussing. And when she didn’t stop I grabbed it from her hands. Just barely kept myself from throwing it across the room.
The trouble was, it would’ve gotten through to her. It would’ve worked. And it troubled me too that my strength and clarity came from my anger at her, while I couldn’t find any toward him. And realizing this made my body hurt again, or made me notice it still did.
I put the tray down on the floor and asked her, “Haven’t you ever planned it?”
“Once,” she said. “After our daughter …” She stopped herself and then started again. “After she left. Don’t you see he’d never let me?”
“I know.”
“He’d find me.”
“Maybe.”
“You, though, you’d better get out.”
I lit a cigarette. And then seeing her face, I gave it to her and lit another one. I said, “He still owes me money.” I said this just to stall. I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t imagine leaving.
“I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you right now if that’s what matters.”
She started to get up again. I didn’t grab her this time. I said, “No, please stay with me.”
We didn’t talk about it anymore that day and I made no move to leave. We puttered around, not doing anything. She still hadn’t taken care of the screens or the pool. We wandered around out there but she said nothing about these things. Late in the afternoon we took a drive together.
It seemed we hadn’t been out in such a long time. I was surprised at how easy it was. I kept half-expecting someone to stop us, a cop to pull us over and send us home, or maybe men wearing overcoats and hats, driving a sedan.
“We could just drive away,” I said because it had occurred to me.
She looked at me like she wished this were true and knew it wasn’t. Like this was the fanciful idea of a child. I felt like one, then acted like one by pouting.
“You’re very sweet,” she said.
I liked that she said this, but when she reached her hand toward me I cowered, huddled against the door and stayed that way a long time.
I couldn’t understand how I’d gotten to this place. We drove and drove, never once stopping anywhere. Finally she turned the car around and we went back.
We ate what we could find in the refrigerator and then went up to her bed. When it was dark I said, “Is that what the others did? Left the first chance they got?”
She didn’t answer me but I could see her nodding.
“Your daughter, too?”
She began to cry when I asked this, but what she said was, “Don’t you see, you have to leave? That this only makes it worse?’
“How?”
“He’ll expect you to be gone. He’ll get someone else.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“What am I doing? I’m living my life. You’re the one who wants to die.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Why can’t you just leave?”
“I’m asking you the same thing.”
“And I’ve told you.”
And I suppose to shut me up she began kissing me. At first I didn’t want her to. It felt wrong. But soon she’d gone far enough I didn
’t care how it started. Only cared how it felt and about letting her finish me.
Once she’d done this it felt wrong again. And I felt wrong and sad. But this seemed all inside me. Like it had nothing to do with her anymore.
I started in on her only to get away from my loneliness. Soon this began working. Working just as well as what she’d done to me. And I could feed off her sounds and her movements, could feed off her wanting me. I got very far away on this. And so when she’d finished, or when I’d finished her, it could almost seem like this was the only thing there’d ever been between us. And that all we’d ever really needed or wanted was sleep.
Seven
We left each other alone about it for another day or so. Then we started planning. She began it. Out of nowhere she said, “We could go together.”
She said we’d have to put distance between him and us. At first we’d need to and then it might be safest to come back. Not here but nearby. Be far enough he wouldn’t run into us, near enough he wouldn’t think to look.
The way she said these things I could see she’d planned it over and over. Had every detail worked out. That she’d even planned it for two and that’s when I thought of the daughter. Worried this was why she said we should come back this way instead of going further away. Worried about this another day before asking her.
“No, that isn’t it,” she insisted with an absoluteness I believed, deciding the daughter’s school must be in Switzerland, somewhere that far away. But then I worried that’s where the husband went. Maybe even where he was right now. And I shouldn’t have asked her but I couldn’t not.
She said, “You think I’d allow that? Is that what you think of me?”
“What do you care what I think? Look where he found me.”
We left it there. I think both of us felt badly about ourselves. I did anyway. I knew I had to quit pressing the daughter thing. But because I was trying not to, I kept tripping over it. Finding things to ask about, and not being able to stop myself until one night we were sitting on the couch having drinks and I asked how old she was. I said, “How old is your daughter?”
Ingrid stared past me, not through me. Already I knew. I knew I’d known all along. And I wished I could take back every stupid question I’d asked her.
“Sixteen,” she said, “always sixteen. Do you understand now? Will you leave it alone?”
I didn’t say anything at first. I didn’t do anything. She went for another drink. When she sat down with it she asked me for a cigarette. I handed her one and lit it for her.
“How long ago?” I asked because to my mind this was a practical question – something I needed to know.
“Five years.”
She still stared off somewhere. I knew she’d tell me whatever I wanted to know if I could stand prodding her. I wanted to know all of it. I told myself I needed to, and so I began asking. “On purpose?” I said.
“No, no. He got carried away. That never describes him very well but that is what happened.”
“You were there?” I asked. I could hear the fear in my voice. The fear that she’d stood by and watched.
“I came home to him on the couch, sitting where you are. He told me to go up and look in on her. I found her just as I found you the other night.
“We called the police. He did. He called someone he knew. A report was written, describing an accident. I don’t know that he ever thinks about it except for bringing home you girls. I don’t know that that means he thinks about it.”
“You think about it.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. And she looked at me for the first time since we began this.
We went up to her bed again, but already everything between us was different. Our tiredness had been gauzy before but now it had a sharpness to it, like we knew where it came from. We lay down together, not touching at first. The lights were out, making the room seem smaller first and then bigger – a place you could get lost in.
I got up and went to the bathroom. Really just wanted somewhere else to be for a minute. Wanted to be without her, though I couldn’t tolerate this for very long.
On my way back I looked out at the pool. I stopped, stood still but the lights weren’t on tonight. Just blackness out there. When I got in the bed I held on to her. I didn’t know what to do except touch her. But I couldn’t be sure what she wanted. Whether she wanted this.
Soon I could tell from her body. It went loose in a way I’d never felt before. She became truly easy instead of resigned. Something about this softness made me soft. And I did everything slowly and stayed gentle. Stroked her and kissed her this way.
She was on her back and I spent a long time just touching her, her arms and her shoulders, her stomach. And after a while she began telling me things that couldn’t possibly be true but which I wanted to hear. Things I’d always wanted to hear. She told me I meant something to her. That I’d made a difference, had changed something for her.
I drew myself alongside her, kissed her mouth in a way I hadn’t before. She pulled me closer and held on and I held on too until I couldn’t. Then I slid her on to her back more, pressed my body into hers and began to rub against her. And even though this wasn’t about that, I made it into that. Was soon kissing her the way I usually did and opening her legs and trying very hard to make this just any other time.
She let me. Maybe she even helped me because after a while she’d turned on to her stomach. Was asking me to fuck her. Once this started she wanted it harder and I did what she said. I was wanting it this way myself but not wanting to be giving it this way. I didn’t think so. But I couldn’t be sure because I’d gotten caught up in her movement. The way she lifted her hips and then slumped down again. The sounds she was making. But when she asked me to hit her I stopped.
It wasn’t something we’d done before. And I didn’t think I could. Not even with her needing me to. We’d come halfway around and then some. We were so far from where we’d started I didn’t think we’d ever get back there. And I was afraid the only way back might be to do what she asked. And then, too, I figured the only reason I craved that softness again was how hard this was getting. And I didn’t think I’d like feeling tender once we got there. I thought instead it would bust me all up.
It was already too late. I’d left her out there alone and she turned away from me. Drew her knees to her chest and lay there not making a sound. I knew whatever I did now, soft or hard, would be forced. She was that unapproachable.
What I did was get up. I left her alone because I’d already done that. And I walked downstairs knowing I’d failed her. That I’d pushed her toward wanting something and then left her alone wanting it. Who was I to decide what was good for her? Though really that hadn’t had anything to do with it. Really, I was afraid. And I couldn’t be sure where the fear came from and this was the trouble. Except this wasn’t true either. What I might’ve done to her was the trouble. That I might’ve been too good at what she asked of me.
I spent the rest of the night on the couch. Curled up under that same afghan we’d used out by the pool. I didn’t sleep exactly. I kept floating in and out, and when I heard her come into the room I didn’t know what to expect so I played I was sleeping. She pulled the blanket up around me, sat beside me, petting me and it was like last night hadn’t happened.
I could almost believe this until I wanted to get up, wanted to put clothes on and realized I couldn’t wear the ones I’d been wearing anymore. Then I looked at her differently – the way I had yesterday.
She didn’t seem to notice or maybe she did because she began telling me things. Saying stuff like she had last night, stuff about having feelings for me. This is where I got scared. Not because I knew not to believe her, but because I wanted so much for her to say these things whether they were true or not. I knew how close this brought me to getting caught up in her make-believe, and so I began right then to ask when he’d be home.
I thought this would keep me safe from both of them and so I kept askin
g. But when I did, she held out her arms and I went to her. I let her hold me and pet me. She told me not to worry, that we’d be gone by then. With her talking this way and her touching, I landed right where I’d started. And so I stopped asking and started guessing.
I’d lost all sense of time. Had no way to know how long he’d been gone – a week, maybe ten days. I didn’t believe he’d stay away much longer than this, but how could I know? Clearly he didn’t expect me to still be here. Clearly she knew what to expect.
More and more I began to let her take over. But always nagging me were the questions I hadn’t asked her. These came down to “How did you let him?” which seemed to make it more her fault than his but I really wasn’t driving at blame. It still seemed practical. Like I needed to know if I could rely on her. If I could at all.
And so I began to ask her again, ask her when he’d be back. Until one evening, not too long after, when we were lying together in much the same way, I pressed it too hard. She let go of me. She got up and walked. Then she turned on me. She said, “You want him back. You miss him.”
She said it like it just dawned on her. But it hadn’t yet come to me. Hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I did need him. That it was simpler with him there. That the sort of jeopardy she put me in was worse. And because of this, because I could see she might just be right, I said, “No, I don’t. I worry about it, that’s all.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “You forget I’ve seen you with him. I’ve seen how you get.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’d do anything.”
Now I was angry, swallowing tears but with nothing to say.
“You pretend it’s about money. That without the money, you’d never have come here. That it makes you different than me…”
“It is why I came.”
“Oh, please. You can’t for a minute believe that, so how are you to convince me?”
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