The Engagement

by Hooper, Chloe

“A brothel! I didn’t know there was a brothel in Norwich.”

  . . . and it catered to people with obscure tastes—it was a place for the real weird types. Sometimes she’d tell me the things these freaks made her do, she whispered them when we were together. Her head had been reset, she liked now to be frightened. Truly, it excited her, the edge of fear seemed to get her going, made her feel something . . .

  I knew Alexander was watching me. But I could not look up from the page. I felt hot and cold. There followed a list of acts I’d truly never thought of. The strange thing was that all this vapid pornography, all the claims that I wanted to be hurt in these various ways, affected me far less than his knowing real details about me: the color of my school uniform—what kind of creep would find that out?—the street where I’d gone shopping as a teenager, the half tires around the grounds of my old primary school.

  “Was there play equipment in the area where you grew up?” As our weekend together approached, Alexander’s questioning had become increasingly off-kilter. He seemed to imagine I was from some urban slum. “Were there any sporting facilities? Any fields or ovals that the local lads could use?”

  He’d asked what I thought were trivial, if odd, questions about my background, and he’d obviously used the answers as aids to further research.

  I shook my head. It was as though he were trying to put me in my place. As he drove me mad, he wanted me to remember where I’d come from.

  “How have you done this?” I now asked. He had not seemed to be a particularly creative man.

  “Done what?”

  “Found this out, made up such filth.”

  “Liese, try to calm down. You’re not thinking clearly.”

  I was still only half dressed. Had he purposely waited until I was nearly naked to have me read his letters? I slapped the pages down next to him and covered myself with a blouse that I now buttoned haphazardly. I grabbed my jeans off the floor, stepping into them. My socks were caught in the jeans’ legs. I leaned against the white bed end, putting them back on my feet as quickly as I could. This bastard wanted a bona fide whore with an anthology of sluttish vignettes for use at night, and enough shame to keep her servile throughout the day.

  Alexander was watching me open a drawer he had just refilled, his expression close to pity. Sighing, he said, “I think you’re trying to avoid something.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “I think you act while in a kind of trance. That you, I don’t know”—he rubbed at his forehead—“that you’re attempting to escape something painful.”

  Was he actually going to head-shrink me, psychoanalyze my false identity? He hadn’t come across his theories riding in his dung-­splattered truck, talking to his cows. Were they remnants of his own failed treatment?

  “It draws you in and you have to have sex. But you don’t feel it. You don’t feel anything.”

  I chose a thick woolen top—if I found a way to get out of this house and walk toward safety, I didn’t want to freeze. I lifted it over my head, and the engagement ring’s platinum claw, the claw holding the diamond, got hooked and pulled at the wool. My head covered, I struggled to unsnag it. Finally I got the top down and slammed shut the drawer. The prissy white chest and its ornaments shuddered. Had he put me in this pink room as a rehabilitative measure? To “give me back” my childhood?

  “Sometimes, as a side effect of trauma, people have addictions, sexual ones.”

  “That’s very unfortunate for them.”

  “It’s treatable.”

  I was sitting on the floor, pulling on my running shoes, lacing them. “You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, Alexander.”

  “Liese, we can face this. The doubts you have, the insecurities, there’s no need. I love you . . .” He leaned forward, his blue eyes now awash with tenderness. And soon he was next to me on all fours, reaching out as though to a scared animal. His not shaving had begun to make him look older. “I want you to feel you can talk about this with me.”

  “Wow, thanks.”

  “From now on, if you have a problem, it’s a problem for both of us, darling.”

  “Why does that sound like a threat?” As I stood I realized I wasn’t only frightened, now I also hated this man, hated his oppressive sincerity, and retrieving the pile of letters I threw them in his face.

  “Okay . . .” Alexander kneeled to bundle the papers. He was strenuously maintaining his calm, even as he gathered up the last page. Straightening, he stared at it and asked casually, “Were you close to any teachers at school?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh”—a small shrug of defeat—“nothing.”

  I grabbed the page out of his hands, knowing that I should not keep reading; it encouraged him and fed my own warped fascination, growing now exponentially like some cursed seed.

  . . . perhaps it was wrong to do it, but she was no longer my student. And if it wasn’t me it would have been someone else who might not have been so caring . . .

  My mistake was to not regard this as pure fiction: instead I started running through the teachers at school, wondering who he meant me to imagine this was—and each candidate was nauseating.

  . . . I answered an ad and I met her in the Holiday Inn on ­Ipswich Road just off the A47. She liked it because there was a glass door at the side facing onto the car park and you didn’t have to walk through a foyer or security to get to the rooms. So I knock on her door and, of course, I presume she recognizes me, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. For six years I’ve seen her across the classroom and not once does she say anything.

  This girl had every chance—I know because the parents turned up each time she or her sister ran a race or sang a song. She’d been quiet and studious until, I don’t know, one weekend she must have watched Pretty Woman on video and next thing you know she’s apparently the school’s great slut—up against fences on Saturday nights, all the kids practically cheering. She was the toast of the staff room each Monday morning.

  One day she turns and asks me to do a certain thing that would hurt her and I didn’t want to do it, not at all, but she’d asked for it and I’d have done anything for her. Well, one thing led to another in that regard. It led to a lot of things, which most people would find too extreme.

  I suppose I had the usual notions of how I’d leave my wife and she and I could move away somewhere warm and she would stop doing this. I was spending so much money. I was spending and spending. To see her I would go without eating or drinking out with friends.

  But finally I realized she didn’t want anything a normal girl would, only sex and cash. Each one got her as hot as the other.

  This is very strange: I’d swear for her it was always the first time we’d met and I was always a stranger. I would dial her number and she would not remember me. Sometimes she’d pretend she did, but I knew it was an act. If I saw her in the morning I doubt she’d recognize me that afternoon. Did she see so many people she couldn’t keep track? I’d bring her gifts, expensive things that women like, and next time I would ask her about them and she’d look blank, or say something polite, humoring me, as if I were the one with a poor memory—and it made me wild, just really angry, and I tell you, I could understand then why men want to hurt whores and I didn’t half wonder if in some cases they deserve it.

  There was more, but I could not bear to keep reading. I looked up at him, my fiancé. My eyes burned; everything around us seemed to be in extreme focus, and I began to laugh. The room was giving way, the grain of the world turning coarse, and as I laughed I could feel myself falling. I had found the very edge of my life and now, too fast, I was descending.

  VI

  We were in his truck driving across the paddocks. How much later it was I did not know, but the day’s color was leaching from the horizon, making this place colder and grayer and more limitles
s. Alexander stopped by various gates and I climbed out. I tried to open their bolts efficiently, to not show that terror made my fingers slip on the cold metal, each lock a new test. No longer did I know what to believe. I did not trust the sky. Or the trees. Or the birds, invisible in the trees’ darkening branches, their volume intense. I did not trust my own body, that my hands would do as I ordered. Wrestling with each gate, every field beyond looked just like the last, but with the slightest reconfiguration of trees and animals—two birds on a branch, then three—a kind of memory game.

  Imagine someone coming to you and handing over a history of your life threaded with enough truth to make you wonder about the lies. What have I done? the letters were gnawing, I don’t understand what I have done. They were fabrications, but whoever had written them seemed to know too much, to have access to information I could barely even recall.

  Another gate, another bolt and latch connected to a thick steel chain: this one older and held together with pieces of rusting wire. The latch had a hole cut through it, and as I attempted to slide the hole at an angle over the head of the bolt, I could feel Alexander’s eyes upon me. He watched from the driver’s seat, in case I took flight across his fields. I tried to raise the whole gate and then unhook the latch. It would not give but my fingers kept trying, growing more clumsy, the engagement ring knocking against the steel.

  Finally the gate came undone; I swung it wide and watched him drive through.

  Shivering, I hesitated: I did not know where we were going, or why. What if I now ran and made it to the national park? Maybe he wouldn’t find me. Maybe no one would. I had heard tales of children and foreigners getting lost in the bush. All around them the landscape must have looked the same, with no markers to distinguish where they’d just been among all those trees that wanted to burn. A school-learned line from Emily Dickinson came back to me: Dare you see a soul at the white heat? No, I thought, I don’t think I do. Those people never had enough water, and walked around and around in parched circles, slowly perishing.

  I heaved the creaking gate closed, and again my fingers wrestled with the cold latch.

  Back in the truck, Alexander said nothing. We’d barely spoken since he showed me the letters. I’d sat in my room feeling concussed while he stayed downstairs in the kitchen. He had not been prepared to leave me in the house alone, and now he was giving off patience—stoic, aggressive, phony patience—as he waited for me to admit my past.

  I closed my eyes.

  What if I had in fact stood against a back fence in a narrow lane, branches splayed above, and at my feet the buildup of leaves, while in the distance traffic sounded, then lights flicked on around the estate—a stranger’s hands on the flesh of my hips?

  What if I had been on the golf course at night, kneeling on the beautifully tended grass, unable to see the stars, to see anything with a belly in my face, fingers pulling at my hair?

  What if I’d enjoyed it?

  As we drove on, the trees moved back and forth, advancing, retreating, their outlines scrambled by mist.

  “Wait,” Alexander said to himself. “Do not tell me.”

  This paddock had an aluminum enclosure in one corner. The cow was lying here alone; in the distance other black calves and cows were stolid shadows.

  Alexander muttered something under his breath. Parking the truck, he got out quickly, swearing. “Do I have to check every tiny detail around here?”

  I got out too.

  “He should have told me she was ready. Useless fucking manager.”

  Through the clumpy, shitty ground, sinking further with each step, I followed as he approached the cow. Up close, the animal was shockingly big, bigger than anything I’d seen outside a zoo. From its vagina jutted two hooves: two round segments of hard, striated bone, then thin ankles strung together, as if the creature were cross-legged inside the womb.

  “It’s all right, girl. It’s all right.” Alexander’s voice had changed slightly. He was stroking the animal’s flank. “It hurts, but you’ll be all right.”

  Coaxing the cow to its feet, he prodded it toward two vertical bars in the enclosure. “Into the crush, come on, in you go.” He got his shoulder up under the cow, up under the protruding hooves, and half heaved, half cajoled the cow into what he called the crush. There was an echoing clang as he slammed closed a hollow steel bar, fixing in place the animal’s neck. The cow blinked a huge sad eye.

  “I’m going to have to pull it out,” Alexander announced, marching to the truck, taking a length of rope from the back. Returning, he looped the rope around the calf’s ankles, then his own body, like he was lassoing himself. He drew it tight, leaning back so the rope took his weight.

  “If you want to make yourself useful . . .” he started, irritated.

  “Just tell me.”

  “Hold the tail out of the way.”

  With fingers numb from the bolts and latches, I took the cow’s tail, a sort of coarse tassel, and tried to look elsewhere. As Alexander began winching one creature from the other, I weighed up whether to make a run for it through his paddocks full of prize minotaurs, whether I’d be running from danger or toward it. While the letters scared me, what gave this fear an extra kick was the ungrounded guilt they aroused. It seemed clear who had written them, and yet I still kept thinking, Someone’s found out about me, but he or she has found out things even I didn’t know I’d done.

  Into the silence a magpie made a warbling, talking call.

  “Push!” Alexander urged tenderly. “Push!” he pleaded, as gently he strained at the rope and the calf moved under the mother’s hide and bone and muscle and meat. The cow bellowed and its legs gave way, the steel crush ringing as its head dropped down. Lying there, exhausted, the animal seemed to call out to the trees and the wind and the dusk, a deep guttural groan of oldest pain.

  How could I have run?

  With the cow collapsed, it was harder to pull the calf out. Alexander sank into soft, wet ground. And soon he was actually sitting down in the mud, his knees bent in front of him, his torso forward, gripping the rope and pulling. He was strong, very strong, and slowly the calf emerged, its lower legs covered in oozing opalescent membrane.

  The mother’s vagina was stretched taut in all its raw elastic complexity, the pink of it unfolding before us. Again the cow bellowed, too alive now, and then the calf’s haunches appeared.

  “Push, push, girl!” Alexander now stood. “Get up and push!”

  I stared at him, and for the first time I thought I saw clearly who he was—the man I might have known if our first meeting had gone differently, if I had come to this place without charging a fee.

  “It’s alive!” Alexander called out, astonished. The cow seemed to be shuddering, but it was the calf’s lithe body moving from inside. “The little bastard’s alive!”

  Alexander pulled harder, his whole face alight, and in one final wet heave, the calf came spilling out.

  It lay on the ground, a black, spineless thing with arms and legs outstretched. It seemed to have no eyes. It seemed to have no mouth. It swam in shiny black oil, twitching and wriggling inside a translucent sheath.

  Alexander grabbed me in an awkward, almost teenage bear hug. He clutched my shoulder, squeezing it, before breaking into an odd little two-step of joy. He was transported. And so was I. Alive! We, too, were alive! I had also been witness to the magic act, and a little voice asked me, Wait, what if this man’s been telling you the truth? And then I thought, But if it’s not him writing, who is it?

  His arm was still over my shoulder. “Why are you surprised it survived?” I asked.

  “I’ve never seen a breech birth that’s left waiting actually make it. They choke usually, choke on amniotic fluid.” Alexander bent down, gently unfolding the calf from the membrane as one might unwrap a parcel. Picking up the thin hind legs, he dragged the newborn beside the mother. He removed the rest
raints from the cow’s head and prodded its flank with his boot, forcing the animal to stand. “Time for work, girl.”

  Heaving itself up, the cow gave a low, deep murmur and sniffed at the calf, licked at it. Under the mother’s great tongue, the calf’s head moved. It flicked its new ears.

  I found I was wiping my eyes.

  Alexander checked that the cow had expelled the placenta, then, bending down, wiped the blood off his hands and wrists on a patch of grass. I stood watching the calf, stunned. The shining black newborn flung out its legs, learning how they worked.

  When Alexander was done, he touched me gently on the arm and we walked to the truck. Dusk was swallowing the horizon, fixing my new need to keep glancing over my shoulder. It was just us, he and I and the animals. I felt a surge of tenderness toward him. I wanted to lay my head on his shoulder, to touch his hand. Watching this had broken me in some way, had broken through to something I hadn’t known was closed over.

  We both opened the truck doors and shut them at the same time; looking at each other, we shyly grinned. For a moment, just for the slightest moment, it was as though nothing bad had ever happened. And we were sitting in the near dark, watching as the gleaming calf knelt beside its mother, found a teat, and drank.

  • • •

  The house smelled of Alexander’s cooking: I followed him through the back door and into the kitchen, where he turned on the light to check the oven. The sink was laden with crockery, as if he’d used every utensil he could find. He cooked without bothering to clean up, and on the workbench was a bowl of peeled and cored apples—he’d started filling the apples’ centers with a red jelly from the food processor—alongside a pile of onion skins, a container of leftover stuffing, and the needle and thread with which he’d sewn the bird’s vent after filling it. Nearby, Larousse Gastronomique was opened to “Roast Goose with Fruit.” I was starving, but the odor of the roasting bird was intense, almost acrid.

  Satisfied with the temperature, he strode out of the kitchen to another of the pokey rooms off the servants’ corridor. He pulled a cord, and on flared a bare globe. This was the laundry.