chapter thirty-nine
HEATHER
They’d been watching me. A video camera perched high in one corner of the room where Detective Kasper escorted me after I’d been summoned back to the local police station to discuss the “concerns” they had over the timeline for the night Viktor died. It was an innocuous-looking space. A laminate-topped table and three basic chairs and thin industrial carpeting on the floor. They’d probably been standing on the other side of the large mirror, waiting for me to crack and tell them everything. Sitting back in the chair, I’d resisted the urge to look directly at the camera or the mirror, or to tap my feet or do anything else that made me look as nervous as I felt.
Daniel was at his grandmother’s again. He practically lives there now; Anna has seen to that. She stocks her house with his favorite foods and buys him lots of toys, claiming it’s to comfort him because he lost his father. I think it’s to help her because she lost her son. She wants to take him away from me, she’s already taken away his affection, but she couldn’t take the child that I carried. Not that she knew about the pregnancy. I was more than four months along, my bump still easily covered with loose-fitting tops. My daughter. I am sure it was a girl. I’d started thinking about names that I liked, Amelia or Isabel or maybe Elizabeth after my mother. Not Betty though, as her nickname. I’d let the names play on my tongue while lying in bed at night, or showering in the morning, jutting my stomach out and rubbing my hand across my belly in a way that I couldn’t do in public.
That’s when the bleeding started. A few drops splashing around my bare feet and the shower’s stone floor like red rain. Nothing to worry about, at least according to the Internet. They swirled in the water and disappeared down the drain. Another drop or two meant nothing. I wouldn’t worry. But then, sitting in the room at the police station, I felt a gush of blood, frighteningly warm, running down my leg. I stood up to get to the door, but doubled over with a terrible, cramping pain, and that’s how I knew for sure they were watching me because the door opened and in rushed Detective Kasper and a female police officer and the next thing next thing I knew I was in an ambulance being taken to the hospital.
They couldn’t stop the bleeding. The hospital staff talk to me in hushed and solemn tones. “Just rest, dear,” a nurse says softly, helping me lie back on the bed as they whisk away the sheets carrying the rest of my baby. There is so much blood. Her blood. “This is very common in the first trimester,” the doctor says in soothing tones, “it doesn’t mean that you can’t conceive again.” But then someone whispers that I’m a widow, and I see the pity on her face. They feel bad that I just lost my husband and now I’ve lost his child, too. I don’t correct them. No one must know that Ray is the father.
The first time he hit me I knew I liked him. His hand hard across my backside as I passed him in the dark hallway on my way to the restroom at his bar. I jumped, whirling around to give this guy a piece of my mind, and there Ray stood, grinning at me. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself,” he said, and there was something in his smooth voice and dark eyes that stopped me from speaking. I could feel his handprint tingling for hours afterward.
I’d met him a week earlier. Viktor was away again at some conference, and Daniel was with his grandmother. My friends were all busy—it was a Saturday night and they were all occupied with their families. Sitting home alone, again, flipping aimlessly through the local paper while I waited for the microwave to cook my Lean Cuisine, I saw an ad for a band playing that night at The Crooked Halo. I hadn’t been to a bar alone since I began dating Viktor, and we hadn’t been to a bar together in several years, not since a hospital charity function. It had been at one of those overpriced jazz clubs with a multi-page cocktail menu and hipster waitstaff. The Crooked Halo was different. It looked like your average neighborhood bar hosting some barely known musical group, so nothing about it should have been appealing, but facing the prospect of another night alone in that house, I thought, why not?
It was fun getting ready. It reminded me of my modeling days, using clothes and makeup to transform into someone else. Skinny jeans, silver tank top, and heels. My hair in loose waves, hoops in my ears. I felt like a teenager with a fake ID, especially when I pulled up in front of the bar, which turned out to be in a blue-collar neighborhood similar to the town where I’d grown up, although it was only a twenty-minute drive from Sewickley Heights.
The band was just getting started—I could hear the thrumming of the bass outside. I paid the five-dollar cover and entered the crowd, feeling the energy from the music. It was pretty packed—maybe the group was better known than I’d thought. I jostled my way to the bar and waited to catch the eye of the bartender. He was a tall guy, well over six feet, and one of those men who fill out a T-shirt. Not a muscle-head, but muscular. Dark, curling hair, a bit of scruff. He was laughing at something a customer said as he slid a beer down the black bar. I saw him register my arrival, keeping an eye on the clientele. “What can I get you?” he said, strolling toward me, and then I saw him really look at me, and I saw his eyes react, while the rest of his face remained impassive.
“A Blue Moon,” I said, leaning forward to be heard over the music.
“You got it.”
He walked away and I got a better look at him. He was a hot guy, that was for sure, but I want to emphasize that I had no intention at that moment of doing anything with him. I hung around the bar, sipping my beer, enjoying the music. They sounded kind of like a Bruce Springsteen cover band. The lead singer had the same gravelly voice and ability to work the crowd.
Four young guys came over to talk to me. College students, they told me, celebrating their buddy’s twenty-first birthday. They were well on their way to wasted, but not too bad at that point, just insisting on talking at me with their beery breath. It brought back the days of clubbing in New York and Miami with my girlfriends. I tried to back away from the guy doing the most talking, but he just pressed forward.
“Hey, why don’t you give the lady some space,” the bartender said. I hadn’t noticed him, but he’d noticed the guys.
The talking one ignored him. His friends glanced at the bartender and away; they seemed too drunk to understand anything. “Do you date younger guys?” the Pitt student was saying. “’Cause it would totally make my buddy’s birthday if you’d be his date. Just for tonight.”
“I’m married,” I said, holding up my left hand and waving it at him with a smile. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” the guy said. “You’re a total MILF.”
“Hey,” the bartender said, smacking the bar with his fist to get their attention. “You heard her—she isn’t interested. Why don’t you go listen to the music?”
“Why don’t you fuck off,” the Pitt student said over his shoulder.
The next thing I knew, the bartender had come around the bar and grabbed that guy by his sweatshirt, hustling him toward the exit. His friends trailed him, protesting, but the big beefy doorman stood up to help and in another moment the students were all out the door. When the bartender came back, I thanked him. “My pleasure. I hate guys like that.” He stuck out a hand. “I’m Ray, by the way.”
I shook his hand. “Heather.”
“Nice to meet you.” He nodded at my almost empty beer. “Want another one? It’s on the house.”
I thought about him all week, replaying the moment he’d come around the bar, how he’d looked when he lifted that college kid practically off his feet. No one else knew that I’d been there, and that added to the attraction. He was my own secret crush. When Viktor had an overnight trip two weeks later, I went back. The second time felt more illicit, because I lied, telling both Viktor and the nanny that I was going to be out late with friends. That was the night Ray slapped my backside as I passed him in the hall. The hallway was in shadows, the music a distant hum. I’d been looking at my phone as I walked and hadn’t realized who it was until I turned around.
No one intends to have an affair. It’s not like I
set out one day and said, let’s see if I can betray my husband. At the same time, I can’t deny that I knew what would happen if I accepted Ray’s invitation to go back to his apartment with him that evening. There wasn’t a single moment when I didn’t think we’d end up in bed together. What I didn’t anticipate was how often I’d return.
“I knew the moment I met you that we were the same,” he said once as he tied my wrists to his bedpost. He liked to play rough, straddling my body, pinching and slapping, laughing as I wriggled underneath him. What is the intersection of pleasure and pain? That is what Ray explores. That is what I like. I’d never met a man like him before.
He didn’t ask the first time he tied me up. We were on his bed, he’d been undressing me, interspersed with lots of touching and kissing, and then, without warning, he grabbed one of my wrists and tied it to his iron headboard with a thin scarf he’d pulled from somewhere. I said, “What the hell are you doing?,” scrambling up and trying to undo the knot with my free hand. “Let me go!” He reached toward me, but he didn’t undo it, he just grabbed my other wrist, tugging it to the other side of the headboard so I was forced flat on my back, before tying it, too.
When he climbed on top of me I started to scream and he placed one of his hands firmly over my mouth and pressed me back into the pillows. I was breathing through my nose, shallow and rapid, sure that he was about to kill me, but he leaned over, his breath hot in my ear, and said in a quiet voice, “Calm down. This is what you want.” And then he released his hand and replaced it with his tongue and I loved it.
That’s what made Ray different. He knew what I liked before I knew, and he liked to play. That was his appeal: that he was different from Viktor, who believed in contracts and clear lines. The prenup he insisted on, for example. That was pure Viktor—orderly and calculated, summing up our relationship with sterile equations. With Viktor, the sex was infrequent and approached with his surgeon’s precision, a scheduled and choreographed act, nothing spontaneous about it. Ray was the opposite. Lots of passion and completely free—no marriage for him, or children, or even a daytime job that impeded getting together. The fact that he worked nights was great. I could visit him during the day while Viktor was at work and Daniel was at school. It was perfect. Of course, I had to think fast to explain some of the bruises, but Viktor accepted my explanations that I’d bumped into things or injured myself while working out. “You’ve got to be more careful,” he said once, frowning at a new mark on my arm. “Our friends are going to think I’m hurting you.”
He was right about that. I tried to hide the bruises from them, too, but they noticed. I found out they were discussing me—it would have been hard not to notice, just as it was hard to hide anything from them. At one point, I considered telling them about Ray, just so they would stop thinking that Viktor was responsible. But they were so convinced that I was being abused that it was too difficult to confess that somebody else had made those marks and that I’d welcomed each and every one. Or at least I did at the beginning.
When I first saw Ray’s box of toys I thought it was like his over-the-top bed, just for fun, nothing more. And it was fun at first. I liked it rough. I liked being restrained as he teased me. I liked the sting of leather followed by the caress of his palm. When I was away from him I thought about the feel of his hand knotted in my hair and the tickle of his breath hot in my ear. I craved the weight of his body pressing against mine.
An affair like this isn’t sustainable long-term, not without everyone in your life turning a blind eye. Eventually, even distracted Viktor grew suspicious. Things came to a head at the Chens’ party. I’d ducked down a hall into an empty room to respond to a text from Ray, but Viktor had seen me leave and came looking for me. “What’s going on?” he asked, trying to see my phone. “Who are you texting?”
“Just a friend—her son’s in Daniel’s class,” I said, slipping the phone in my clutch purse and heading toward the hall. “Let’s get back to the party.”
“Stop,” he said, holding up his hand like a traffic cop. “Let me see your phone.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous.” I walked around him and he grabbed me from behind.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Let go of me!”
“You think I’m stupid? You think I don’t realize what you’re up to?”
We were tussling when we suddenly caught sight of Julie’s reflection in the room’s large windows. Viktor immediately released me. I could tell he was embarrassed and it was equally obvious that Julie thought he was mistreating me.
I couldn’t tell her that it wasn’t Viktor hurting me. It was Ray.
It started one afternoon when his large hand circled my throat and he whispered that he was going to choke me. I laughed and pushed him off. “No way.”
“You don’t trust me,” he said. He’d been fitting a blindfold on me, but he yanked it off and stalked out of the bedroom. Surprised, I scrambled off the bed, running after him.
“That’s not true,” I said, grabbing his arm. “I love you.”
“There’s no love without trust.”
“I do trust you, I swear.”
He gave me a long, considering look and then he said, “Prove it.”
It felt weird, but I said okay. I let him put the blindfold on me as I stood there naked and shivering, suddenly afraid to say anything that would make him think I doubted him. His hand on my throat was both warm and startling. He squeezed, tighter and tighter, until I couldn’t talk even if I’d wanted to, and I did want to, I wanted to scream at him to let go. It came out as a gargle, the cry of a wounded bird, and I heard his voice deep in my ear. “Do you trust me?”
When I hesitated, his hand started to release me, it was like I could feel his disappointment, and I nodded, whispering a strangled “Yes.” His hand tightened again and I struggled not to pull away even as he increased the pressure. How long did he keep me like that? I don’t know. All I know is that when he finally let go, I fell forward, coughing and gagging. “You’re wonderful,” he said, undoing my blindfold, and when I started to cry, he thought my tears were from happiness that I’d pleased him. “These are like my collar,” he said, touching the livid red marks that were already turning purple. “You belong to me.”
I was angry, but at myself as well as Ray. I’d allowed this stupid game to happen and now I had bruises that I couldn’t explain away. Luckily, the temperatures dipped that week, so I could hide the marks on my throat with turtlenecks and scarves. I told Viktor I had a cold and slept in the spare bedroom for a week and I didn’t see Ray for a few days. He texted me repeatedly, telling me how much he missed me. I thought it was sweet. I didn’t see it as controlling. As the bruises faded, so did my anger. It was just a one-off, I told myself. Ray hadn’t meant to go that far.
So I went back to him. And he went further. The play got harder and more complicated. For a while it would be fun, but then he’d start talking about testing my pain threshold and how I was holding out on him. The bruises got bigger and lasted longer. I’d thought he didn’t believe in rules and contracts and what he called the symbols of false relationships. That’s what he’d said. It turned out that Ray just believed in his own rules.
He would text me throughout the day and night and he wanted me to text him back promptly. “I need to know that you’re okay,” he said. “I can’t focus on my work if I’m worrying about you.” I tried to explain that I couldn’t do that, not if Viktor was around, but Ray got annoyed whenever I mentioned my husband. “Do you know how lucky you are?” he said as he watched me getting dressed one afternoon. “What other man would tolerate you going home to another guy?”
When I talked about ending our relationship, Ray slapped me across the face. I was so shocked that I didn’t react, just stood there in his apartment, my hand to my cheek. Then he started to cry, big, sloppy tears rolling down his face, sniffling as he told me that he loved me so much that he couldn’t live without me. That’s when I knew it w
as over.
The irony was that my friends were begging me to leave Viktor. Believe me, I considered it. Leave Viktor and Ray. Except how would I support myself? Go back to modeling? At my age that meant catalog work if I was lucky. I had few other skills. In my case, what you see really is what you get. I didn’t want to have to go crawling back to West Virginia with nothing to show for my time away but some nice clothes and a little bit of bling. If I left Viktor I’d come away virtually penniless; the prenup had seen to that. The trouble with being fortunate enough to live at a certain level of comfort is that it becomes so much harder to live without it.
Just Between Us Page 32