by Vina Jackson
And what about her? How much had she ever known about the forces manipulating her sexuality? Had her heart ever opened up to him, or had she just been prey to her inner desires and selfishly indulged them all along?
If only he could see her now, look deep into her eyes; maybe there would be an answer lying there, a clue to this terrible jigsaw puzzle where feelings and cravings waltzed in mad abandon and made him feel so helpless.
It had been forty-eight hours and Summer still hadn’t returned to the loft.
Maybe she was staying with a friend. Cherry possibly, Susan, her agent, or, more likely, her conductor friend Simón, whose rehearsal space had always been suspiciously available to her at all times.
Her clothes still hung in the shared wardrobe alongside his, in now uncomfortable proximity, and he would on a regular basis thread his fingers between the softness of the fabrics with a deep pain gripping his heart, dragging the smell of her body from the depths of the varied materials. Like an old pervert, he realised. At least he wasn’t manically rifling through her underwear. Not that the thought hadn’t occurred to him.
He couldn’t help notice the Bailly, snug in its now battered case, sitting in the far corner of the loft’s living space. He was surprised she had left it here, not returned to retrieve it. As if leaving the violin to its own fate was a final indication that she had no intention of seeing him again, a poignant reminder of what had brought them together.
No, it wasn’t his fault, Dominik decided. And neither was it hers. They had just been pawns, victims of their lust and the contradictions of desire.
Whereas Victor was another matter altogether. He’d known all along what he was doing. He had to bear the bulk of the responsibility for the sad, sordid even, events that had unrolled.
‘Hi, Lauralynn.’
‘Hello, Dominik. How are you?’
‘To be honest, bloody angry . . . How did Boston go?’
‘Piece of cake,’ Lauralynn replied. ‘What are you angry about?’
‘Your friend Victor.’
‘Oh dear, up to his old tricks again, is he?’
‘I don’t really want to talk about it. Do you know where I can reach him? I’ve mislaid the piece of paper I’d written his address on. I need to discuss something with him.’
‘Really?’
‘Please, Lauralynn . . .’
‘Don’t do anything you’ll come to regret, Dominik,’ Lauralynn said, but then gave him the address, which he had, of course, never even had in the first place. Something she seemed well aware of.
‘Dominik?’ But he’d already disconnected.
It did not go well.
Ambushed at his apartment, Victor would not allow Dominik in and insisted they take the conversation outside. Both men were reluctant to face up to each other in a bar or somewhere overly public. The building where Victor lived happened to be a few blocks away from Central Park, close to the Dakota, and they ended up by the pond, not far from the Hallett Sanctuary. Night was nearing and passers-by and tourists were growing scarcer.
Victor’s initial reaction was flippant when Dominik brought up the subject of the party and the way he had manipulated Summer into participating.
‘But you had an opportunity to stop the proceedings, didn’t you? You just stood back, didn’t you? Allowed her to go through with it. I was merely an observer by then,’ he pleaded, his customary superior smirk painted across his face, like a red rag to a bull.
Dominik felt bile rising up his throat, every single word of Victor’s like a stab to his heart, reminding him of his infamy and what now clearly appeared to be the biggest mistake of his life.
‘It just took me by complete surprise,’ he protested. ‘I still have no idea why she agreed to get involved with you in the first place and be at the centre of that grotesque orgy. I’m sure you planned it that way all along.’
‘Well, I do concede I might have been a bit mischievous,’ Victor said, dragging his step along the darkening path, hands in his pockets.
‘You set it all up, Victor. Now, I’m not saying you openly lied to either Summer or me, but you sinned by omission, clearly. How could you?’
‘Neither of you was innocent, Dominik. Anyway, what’s a little sin between friends, eh? Sin makes the world go round,’ he laughed gently.
‘You fucking creep.’ Dominik’s patience was at boiling point, increasingly stirred by Victor’s nonchalance, the man’s seeming indifference to the situation he had slyly provoked. The man actually looked smug, as if Dominik’s anger made it all so much more amusing.
Victor stopped, turned to Dominik and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘she’s just a girl. She’s disposable. You shouldn’t get on your high horse. Anyway, she wasn’t even a great fuck, was she?’
Dominik brushed Victor’s hand away from him.
He was simmering inside, and out of nowhere, the thin line between anger and fury snapped. He bunched his fist and punched Victor in the jaw. The other man stumbled back, falling to the ground as much as from the impact of Dominik’s hand as by the element of total surprise. He raised a hand, an instinctive signal for his aggressor to stop, and opened his mouth.
‘You’re crazy,’ Victor shouted out.
It took a few seconds for the pain in his bruised knuckles to register, at which point Dominik flinched. He’d never been a violent person – he couldn’t even remember the last fight he’d participated in – but hearing Victor speak of Summer as if she were an object, with no respect for her mind or her body, had filled him with an uncontrollable rage. He had never fought for a woman’s honour before, but in that moment he realised he would go to any lengths to defend Summer, to protect her from predators like Victor, who saw her weaknesses and her naivety as an opportunity to exploit.
He swore under his breath and looked over at Victor’s face, contorted in a rictus of both pain and shock, his mouth pursed, lips trembling.
‘You bloody well asked for it,’ Dominik cried out. Victor now looked so small, but he still had the deep-seated feeling that the man was mocking him. With a final glare, Dominik turned to leave.
‘That’s right, go back to your worthless whore.’ The words were muttered under Victor’s breath but loud enough for Dominik to hear. He paused, turned and, with a kick more violent than he’d intended, sent Victor sprawling.
Reality returned in a rush and Dominik reeled back in disgust at what he had just done. Victor lay groaning on the ground. Dominik glanced around him. No one nearby. His assault had in all likelihood gone unnoticed. What should he do? Stay around until Victor recovered?
In a nearby tree, a bird tweeted cheerfully and the weight of what he had done dawned on Dominik. He’d fought a man, a man who was smaller and a good decade older than himself. And all over a woman. It was worse than a cliché; it was pathetic. He turned and walked away.
The few days without Dominik had been the final nail in the coffin.
I asked Simón to wait for me outside as I collected my few belongings. I’d tried telling him that I didn’t have much stuff and that having lived in three continents already, I was perfectly capable of packing the contents of one suitcase on my own, but he insisted on following me around, as if he were afraid that he might lose me if I was out of his sight for more than an hour.
I let him come in the end, but I wouldn’t allow him in the actual loft. That would have been the final blow – if Dominik had come home and found him there, or if he could somehow sense that another man had been in the bedroom that we had shared together.
The apartment felt empty even before I folded my few clothes into my case and gathered up my shoes and toiletries. With the tour, I supposed I’d been gone months before I’d actually left for good.
‘Wow,’ said Simón, when I carried the case down the stairs, ‘you really don’t have much stuff. I presumed you were exaggerating.’
I’d tried to sit down and write Dominik a note before I left the flat – telling him that I was s
orry, providing him with some kind of closure – but the words just wouldn’t come. He was the writer, not me.
In the end, I just took my stuff and went, hoping that he’d somehow understand all the things that I couldn’t say to him.
Moving in with Simón happened without any conscious thought. At first, it seemed the obvious place for me to go. He easily had the space for an extra person, particularly since I’d started sharing his bed. Plus he had a dedicated rehearsal room, which saved me the trouble of finding a space to play that wouldn’t upset any neighbours. Going to a hotel would have been silly. I could have taken refuge at Baldo and Marija’s. Cherry probably would have offered her couch if I had tracked her down and explained the situation, but I was too proud to admit that she’d been right. I’d been too proud about almost everything.
He was quick to make room in his wardrobe for my clothes. An empty drawer appeared overnight in his bathroom cabinet. My things gradually began to find a home in his apartment. We went out on dates together and to dinner parties, and his friends presumed that we were an item before I had a chance to say that the arrangement was temporary.
Before I knew it, I was in another relationship.
Simón was passionate and had a libido higher than any man I had ever dated. Higher even than Dominik. We had sex morning and night, and often during the middle of the afternoon as well. Our lovemaking was frequent and furious, and though I knew I ought to spend some time on my own before diving headlong into another life with yet another man, I didn’t think that I could manage without it. His body over mine blanked out all the uncomfortable thoughts that chased me in the middle of the night.
My mind often turned to Dominik. I wondered whether we could have ever made it work. If I’d been honest with him. If he hadn’t been so jealous. If I hadn’t gone on tour. So many hypothetical situations.
I missed the hardness of his touch. Everything about Simón was soft and warm, from the heat of his body to the golden colour of his skin, his easy laugh and the vigour with which he approached everything from sex to food to music. He had an enormous appetite in every respect and a cheerful optimism that Dominik had lacked but which sometimes got on my nerves. He had a spring in his step that matched the spring in his hair, and the bounce threatened never to leave either.
It was like living with a ray of sunshine. Eventually, I began to long for rain.
One night, we went out to the cinema. Simón spent most of the film running his hand under my skirt, while I tried desperately not to respond to avoid upsetting the people sitting next to us. It was a superhero film, the sort that attracted kids as well as adults, and we were surrounded by families. Simón was the very opposite of Dominik in this respect as he was in most others. Besides being appropriately attired, which was crucial to him, he cared very little about the way that he appeared in public.
He had wanted to walk instead of catching a taxi home. He’d noticed his trousers getting tighter since we moved in together and had suddenly taken a greater interest in getting his daily exercise. Or perhaps it was part of a plan that he had hatched earlier, and the sex shop that we happened to walk past on Sixth past 18th Street was by design and not by accident.
‘I thought we might try something new,’ he whispered into my ear, his voice full of mischief.
‘Oh?’
I didn’t know whether to be offended. I had thought the sex we were having was pretty good. We certainly had enough of it, and the thought that he might not be satisfied troubled me.
He walked straight to the section with the restraints on display, everything from satin bed ties to spreader bars and thick leather cuffs.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
I picked up a pair of flimsy-looking pink fluffy handcuffs, the sort that wouldn’t look out of place at a hen party. The leather cuffs were much more my style, but I didn’t want to scare him by demonstrating that I already had quite a bit of experience with this sort of thing.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘I’d feel like an idiot wearing those.’
‘You’d feel like an idiot?’
His face turned red. It was the first time I’d seen him blush. ‘Never mind. It was a stupid idea.’
The sales assistant was looking at us curiously.
‘No, it’s not a stupid idea. I just presumed that you meant for me.’
‘Remember that night we first kissed?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You had a piece of rope in your bag. I thought . . . You seem like the kind of girl who might enjoy being in charge. I’ve always wanted to try it. Not being in charge, that is.’
My heart sank. I knew perfectly well that it was completely hypocritical, but I had never been able to get used to the vision of submissive men either in clubs or in the few private scenes that I had witnessed. The thought of Simón on his knees in front of me made my skin crawl. Somehow I had never expected this of him. Another black mark against my powers of observation, or further evidence of how self-centred I was. He seemed so naturally authoritative, particularly when he led the orchestra. After all that I had been through, though, I could hardly deny him the opportunity to try it. Maybe it would be different with someone to whom I was attracted.
We left the shop with a set of black satin scarves and some novelty lingerie Simón had taken a fancy to.
As the saleswoman packed our purchases into a discreet bag, I could almost hear the sound of Dominik’s mocking laughter ringing in my ears.
That night, I tied Simón’s wrists and ankles to the bedposts. His eyes glazed over and he purred as though all of his Christmases had come at once. I stared at the wall over the headboard as I rode him and wondered for the millionth time what it was that I truly wanted. I closed my eyes and played with myself, drumming up a flood of images in my head. Dominik appeared in all of them, but despite that, I didn’t orgasm.
Simón fell asleep with the restraints still on him minutes after he came. I untied him gently and moved his limbs together so that I could slide into bed alongside him.
Sleep evaded me like a thief in the night.
I got up quietly and pulled my case out of the hallway wardrobe. I had left the length of rope in one of the zip pockets, the only place I could think of that Simón wouldn’t come across it by accident. I put the case back and then went into the bathroom with the rope and a bottle of lubricant.
Simón was a heavy sleeper, but I turned the water on anyway to drown out the soft sound of my masturbating. I could see myself in the mirror as I did so, the rope pressed firmly against my throat.
I was not suicidal in the slightest, nor seeking self-harm. I never pulled it so tight that it might do any damage, even temporarily, but that gentle restriction of my breathing heightened my arousal enough to make me orgasm within minutes.
How I wished it were Dominik’s hand that did it instead of a noose round my neck.
Dominik took the subway back to Spring Street. The moment he opened the door to the loft, he knew Summer had been there in his brief absence. The smell of her perfume hung faintly in the air, and her row of shoes no longer crowded the minimalist line of the corridor wall that led into the apartment’s main living space.
The violin had gone, and she had, no doubt in a rush, also taken all her clothes. She’d forgotten her toothbrush, some make-up, an assortment of cream and shampoo bottles and tubes, and the old strip of probably out-of-date birth-control pills that had been lingering in the bathroom while she had been touring Australia and New Zealand, like a bequest to him, something to remember her by.
Not even a note.
Even though this didn’t come as a surprise, Dominik’s heart dropped.
It brought a sense of closure to their relationship.
For the following two days he stayed in, neglecting his minor duties at the library, unable to concentrate on much, let alone researching or writing. He was fearful that any time the door buzzer went off it would be Victor, or the police. Even if Victor didn’t bring char
ges, there was a chance a passer-by had witnessed his attack. He knew that the assault would have looked overly violent, and if someone saw it and told the police, they might choose to arrest him.
By Saturday morning, he’d reached a decision. He packed his stuff, sent a series of apologetic emails, resigning from his fellowship and offering to reimburse any monies he had already been paid to the real-estate company who owned the loft. He took a yellow cab to JFK, knowing that hiring his customary limo service would leave a record of his movements. Here, he booked himself on the first available overnight flight to London.
Hampstead was still asleep in the early hours of Sunday as he alighted from the taxi, searched for his house keys at the bottom of his carry-on bag and opened the door to his house. The heath, in the distance, was greener than ever, a particular shade of green that somehow only belonged to English climes. Now holding his luggage in both hands, he gave the door a gentle kick and the dry odour of his books reached him like a wave of welcome.
He was home.
Two months went by. Time for Dominik to regroup. He agreed with the university to extend his sabbatical for a further two terms and gradually fell into a steady writing routine. He woke, as he always did, early every morning before first light, hammered out a required amount of words on the novel and then allowed himself to relax in the afternoon, reading, catching up on DVDs or walking the heath if the English weather didn’t conspire against him.
Of course, Summer was still on his mind and not a day would go by without painful memories as well as joyful ones piercing the mask of his enforced emotional silence. As he trod the damp grass of the heath, he couldn’t help recalling the sight of Summer making her way across it, towards the bandstand where she had played for him privately for the first time. It now felt like a lifetime ago. He knew it was inevitable and there was no point in fighting it. He just had to accept these bittersweet feelings and survive them as best he could. Maybe time would bring a measure of solace, but he wasn’t betting on it.