“Leave me alone,” she moaned from the other side. “Please.”
He slammed himself against the door, hurting his shoulder. Standing back, he raised one leg and kicked at it, and something cracked in the frame. She screamed.
“Stop it,” he said. “Who do you think I am?” He hit the door with the side of his fist.
On the other side, she retreated to the bathtub and shower, pulling the curtain up as if to shield herself. “Please!” she shrieked, but she couldn’t hear her own voice.
“You know what happiness is?” he said. “Does it ever cross your mind to think about that anymore? Happiness? Happiness! Think about it! Nobody’s hurting you. Somebody’s being good to you! Somebody loves you and provides for you and delights in how you laugh and how you talk. Somebody listens to you and thinks about you. You understand? Isn’t that happiness?” He kicked the door again. And then again. “Well? Answer me! Isn’t that happiness? Isn’t it?”
“Oh, God.”
“Who do you think I am?” he shouted. “I’ll tell you who I am. I’m your husband, who doesn’t deserve this! Who has done nothing wrong. you’ve shut him out! You’ve kept things from him and lied to him and let others know about it and made him feel small and nothing and weak! That’s me. That’s who I am. That’s your husband. And you want me to leave!” He kicked the door still again with this last, and it blew open. Pieces of the frame flew everywhere, and it was as though her scream were part of the sound of the splintering wood.
Seeing her cringing against the wall next to the shower, with the curtain pulled up to cover the front of her, he thought she looked pitiable, and yet it did not make him feel for her. It made him angrier. He had the urge to flail at her, strike her. But he held himself back, moving slowly into the room. And now, amazingly, he felt a rush of something weirdly like calm purpose and righteousness. There was no need for any thinking. He would show her now; she would know what kind of man he was now. He watched his hands reach to her face, and gently he took hold, his big hands on either side. She was trembling and crying. Tightening his hold, he pressed harder, feeling the cheekbones. Then he shook her. “Stop it. Be quiet. I love you. Can’t you see that?”
“You’re—hurting—” she got out. The wine on his breath was making her sick. Gradually she began losing balance, was unable to stand, being held up by his hands. His hands trembled, squeezing, pressing.
“Look at me. Will you? This is me. This is me.”
She said, “Let go. Let go of me!”
And he did, and she was leaning against the angle of wall and shower stall, still gripping the shower curtain, holding it just under her chin.
“God,” he said. “You—my God.”
“Get out,” she rasped, and then coughed. “Leave me alone.”
“You have to understand,” he told her. But there was nothing he could find to say, nothing he could explain. “I’m s-sorry about the—door,” he said, controlling himself. “I’m sorry about—this.” She covered her face and turned from him, crying.
He was angry all over again. “But you’ve got to understand me. You listening? I don’t want kindness from you. Understand? I don’t want pity.”
“Oh, God,” she said, “Stop it. Stop it. Leave me alone!”
For a moment, they did not speak, standing close in the too-bright light, the door at its appalling angle and the debris at their feet, the only sounds her sobbing and sniffling and his shaken breathing.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said finally. “Everything’s broken. I’m broken. This—you and me. This is broken.”
“No,” she said. “Oh, please! You don’t know. You don’t know!”
He said, “I know. I know.”
She did not move. And she could not stop crying.
“All right,” he said evenly, thinly, his voice rough and straining. “All right. You want me to leave. That’s what you’ve wanted all along, right? So I’ll leave. I will leave.”
Through the blur of her tears, she saw him draw up as if to reach for her again. She cowered back a little more. “I—don’t—know—wh-what you’re—talking about,” she got out through the sobs and gasping.
“Ah, God,” he said. “Go on, then. Go back to whoever you ran into, okay? Just—go. Why should you stay with me out of—out of—kindness. I’m sick and tired of kindness. You go right ahead. You went to Jamaica and had a high old time and you didn’t know where I was and you were lonely—”
She screamed at him, “I was raped!” The word came in the long top of the scream. “Goddamn you! I was raped. I was raped.”
He faltered back. Neither of them moved for a time. Again, there was just the sound of their tattered breathing, her crying.
Gasping it out, low, not looking at him, she said, “Oh, God. God!” She straightened, still clutching the shower curtain. And now her voice was bitter and defiant. “Do you get it now?”
They stood there looking into each other’s eyes.
He saw the splintered and bent frame of the door, and the door itself, lying askew across the counter next to the sink. His heart was hammering in his temples, and he took another step back, one hand reaching for the broken frame. “God, baby.”
“Go,” she told him. “Please. Leave me alone. Please.”
He started toward her, but she cowered against the wall and screamed again. “Get away from me!”
Slowly he backed out of the room. “Can we just …” he began.
“Get away,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Just please leave me alone.”
Searching his mind for some way through, something else occurred to him: “Who—how did it—honey—”
“There’s nothing I have to say to you,” she said. “God! Not now.” She sobbed again. Then, sniffling, more calmly: “We’ll talk in the morning. Please. Please.” The words came with the crying, the struggle for breath.
“But—you can’t just—did you know him? Was he with—where was—where did it happen?”
“Will you please just leave me alone.”
“We can’t just—” he said.
“Yes, we can.” She was crying quietly. “I did.”
“I’ll kill him.”
She said nothing, still stood there with the shower curtain pulled up. When he started toward her she screamed. “Don’t you touch me!”
He went out and got into his car and drove to the Midtown apartment. He let himself in and moved to the little bedroom, where the folding bed still stood in one corner. There was an ache starting in his hip from having kicked at the bathroom door in the little house. He had thought his purpose in life was always to be kind and brave and good, but it was clear to him now that he had wanted more than anything else to be loved. It seemed to him that everything was over, all his plans and hopes, all his dreams and wishes and everything in which he had ever put the slightest faith. Then he thought of her and realized the selfishness of his own grief. He removed his shoes, opened the folding bed, sat down, and looked at his hands.
Do You Take This Man
1
Alone in the house, where the only sound was her crying, she had the vision: If she were a character in a movie, Duego would come back. He would leap out at her from a doorway or climb into the window of the house, and there would be a struggle. He would try to kill her. And she would kill him. The story would be over in a single cathartic moment of action. There would be the usual matters to take care of involving police and the courts and the public eventualities, the explanations. The verdict would be that her action was justified, of course: self-defense. Her life would be saved. Her husband would hold her, and they would forgive each other everything.
But in the story she was living, the hours of the rest of the night went on, while she sat, terrified, on the bed, still crying, and intermittently going to the front door to look out. She did not want him to come back; and at the same time she was afraid he would not do so. She wanted the baby, but what had ha
ppened to her glared forth, and made her want to be rid of it—shed it, push it out of herself, and be clean again.
“God,” she said aloud. “No.” And then she repeated it. “No.”
She thought of the sixty to seventy percent who went on with their lives. She imagined them never speaking of it. And nobody noticing anything. It must be that in one way or another they found the strength to make a kind of truce with it. Somehow they succeeded in concealing it, and they smiled and laughed and went with friends and made love and they had no nightmares about it, and nobody was the wiser—or else they did have the nightmares and lived secretive, haunted lives, enduring by some means the anxiety and the scarred sense of themselves, the fear of every change, listening always in the dark, carrying the feeling of trespass and violation but showing the world only the polite, desperate lifting of a hand to wave, like that poor doomed woman in the ruin of the south tower. She worked to put the thought away, afraid that, simply by thinking it, she was depriving the dead person of her dignity. And then she thought of the men who committed these crimes and went on with their own lives, and did it over and over again. And yet too many people, men and women both, considered the thing itself a form of sexual excess, or even, awfully, in some mysteriously habituated way, an unacceptable breech of propriety. The whole culture smacked of it, smelled of it.
She sat on the bed, crying now for all those whom she would never know, as if they were all one species together, a type of creature, crouched in the failure of light all around them, estranged from where they lived, crushed by expectations and by assumptions.
And she thought about what her husband had assumed.
Finally, she got dressed and walked in the predawn toward Iris’s. It was growing colder, and there was a fine mist. The mist soaked her as she walked. She let herself in, and quietly made her way upstairs, to her old bedroom, for something else to put on. Then she carried it into the bathroom, and looked at her face in the mirror. No bruising. She got out of the wet clothes and stepped into the shower. It was as it had been in Jamaica, the hot water pouring down, mixing with her tears.
“Natasha?” Iris’s voice, full of alarm.
Natasha turned the water off and stepped out. “I’m all right.”
Iris was standing in the doorway. “Is he downstairs?”
“I sent him away,” Natasha said, wrapping a towel around herself.
“You have to go back,” Iris told her, stepping into the small space with her and putting her arm over her shoulder. “You have to find him. Did you tell him about the baby? What happened? Tell me.”
“He was drunk. We had a fight.”
“You have to go find him.”
“Let me get dressed, please?”
“I’ll be downstairs. But you have to be there when he comes back. I’ll make coffee, and we’ll have a cup, but you must go back. Did you argue with him? You can’t argue with him drunk, sweetie, you can’t do anything with them when they’re drunk. You’re just arguing with what they’ve had to drink. But you have to be there when he comes home, and you can talk to him then. You know that.”
“Please?” Natasha said.
The other shook her head, moving out into the hall. “I’ll be downstairs.”
She closed the door and got into the dry clothes. It was hard to breathe fully out, and she waited, trying to decide what she would say, how she would explain it.
Downstairs, her grandmother had put coffee on. She was standing at the stove, and Natasha saw the thick blue veins of her ankles.
“Sit,” Iris said.
Natasha did so and put her hands flat on the table before her, sniffling. “Can I have a vermouth?”
“Coffee. It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
“Vermouth. Oh, please.”
“So you’ll be drunk.”
“I haven’t had anything to drink, Iris. I—I need something to calm me down.”
“What about the baby?”
“Oh,” Natasha said, crying out. “I don’t want the baby. Not like this.”
Iris stared, her mouth partly open.
“Oh, God. I can’t. I can’t.”
“Tell me,” Iris said. “Come on. Tell me now.”
2
He woke with a start, hearing the sound outside of a motorcycle. His head hurt. He had a swooning sense of a thing he was failing to do and then fully realized all of it, sitting up, the muscles of his abdomen twisting and cramping, his heart pounding. He had fallen asleep in his clothes.
He got out of the cot and walked unsteadily to the door of the apartment, which was ajar. He saw the street in gray light. The sky was a flat cloud screen, and there were patches of fog in the road at the end of the block. Little pockets of mist clung to the lower branches of the trees. It was a gray, chilly morning. He went back to the cot and put on his shoes. Up the street, Mr. Baines was sitting on his little porch in a bomber jacket, eating. Faulk, in his agitation, thought of him as the fat landlord. The thought was not something he had known himself capable of having. He had come to a new region of his own being and it frightened him. He wanted to break something, tear something down. Baines waved for him to come over.
“Want some?” he said, as Faulk approached.
“What is it.”
“Lasagna from last night.”
“Not for breakfast.”
“Taking what might be my last morning outside for a while. It’s gonna get cold today.”
Faulk watched him eat.
“Cold front coming.”
He started to move off.
“I’ve got somebody who’ll sublet,” Baines said, “if you change your mind about keeping it. So you see, old Baines will even help someone find a sublet if he wants to marry a young woman and live elsewhere and changes his mind about keeping it.”
“Like I said, it’ll be used as a place to work.”
“Did you work all night? You don’t look good.” The smile didn’t change. But there was a sly glint in the eyes.
“In fact, that’s exactly what I did. I worked all night.”
“What kind of work does a former priest do?”
Faulk hesitated.
“You in the doghouse, old son?”
“I’m writing a book,” Faulk told him. “How about you? You writing one?”
The other man shoved a forkful of the lasagna into his mouth and spoke through chewing. “Baines likes to know how his tenants are doing.”
“I asked if you’re writing a book,” Faulk said.
“You ever taste cold lasagna?”
“No thanks.”
“You gonna be spending the night often?” Something smug about the little smile in that heavy face made Faulk want to batter him. It was the mood of this hour in the world.
“Maybe,” Faulk said.
“Well.” The other grinned at him. “Of course that’s your business.”
He walked back down the street to the car and got in and started it. And began to cry. Who had done it; why had she not told him?
Daylight had not yet cleared the trees at the horizon. Back up the street, the fat landlord was hunched over his repellent dawn meal.
At the house, he let himself in and walked through the rooms. He saw the broken door in its shocking crooked angle against the bathroom sink, and he turned slowly, looking at the windows, the furniture, all the facets of life as it was supposed to be. Then he faced again the destruction of the doorway into the bathroom. The frame, the baseboard, the lintel—crooked, splintered, and broken, bending into the space of the opening. All this had happened.
Feeling the lingering effects of the wine, he made his way into the living room and sat down on the sofa. His own rasping exhalations were the only sound. Without consciously deciding to, he began going over it all again, thinking it through, step by step, and then he remembered that she had been assaulted. She had been assaulted, and this was what she had been waiting to tell him. He saw an image of her sitting up in the bed, the book open on her knees
. “Oh, God,” he said.
He could not imagine a way back to her; he believed she would never want to find a way.
She would have gone to Iris’s.
He drove there and then lost courage and drove by, looking at the place in the lawn where Adams had lain. Adams, the one with whom he had gotten drunk—the one whose trivial, silly descent into helplessness was one pass in a night that, if it had ended with simply going to sleep, would not even be something worth remembering. Though Adams was a man suffering, too, reliving the loss of his wife, five years ago, still afflicted with it, and Faulk had spent so much of his life trying to see into such suffering and also seeking to give help, seeking to understand it deeply enough to offer solace.
Kindness.
Through the living room window of Iris’s house, he saw that there was still a light on in the kitchen, though cloudy sun was coming through the tops of the trees now. He had an image of her sitting in that kitchen talking to her grandmother, telling her, if Iris did not already know everything, about what happened in Jamaica. The secret she had been keeping all this time. He saw again the look of pure unknowing on her face as he accused her. He wanted in this moment, more terribly than he would have believed possible, to die.
3
“Why didn’t you report it?” Iris said, crying. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell Michael?”
“Don’t,” Natasha said. “Please.”
They were at the kitchen table, facing each other. Iris reached across and took her hands. “Why didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t. Please.”
There was a slight pause.
“I talked to someone in Orlando, a policewoman. It—look, there’s nothing to be done.”
“Oh, God,” Iris burst out. “What am I saying?” She stood up and moved around the table and embraced her, holding her head against her abdomen, softly patting the side of her face.
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