Red Audrey and the Roping

by Jill Malone

  Somehow this argument—neither eloquent nor impassioned—came off better in my head. It felt staged and ridiculous in the middle of the racquetball court with the girl kneeling. I couldn’t change the way she would remember this. We should have been laughing.

  “Your back—”

  Oh Christ, say it or don’t, but all this hedging. I wanted to shake her. Guilt—mine, my own guilt, and strangely hers too—was a fireball in the dust-clouded room: so palpable, I thought I could smell it.

  “What’s he using?”

  “A dress belt.”

  “I think two of them are infected.”

  She picked up her racket and looked at it. I realized we’d been whispering.

  “You don’t have marks on your wrists. How’s he pinning your arms?”

  “Did he do this to you?” I asked.

  “Not him.”

  “A silk tie.”

  “It never lasts,” Emily said. “They lose their shape and don’t hold tightly enough.”

  “There have been complaints.”

  She spaced the strings on her racket absently with her fingers.

  “He’ll upgrade to rope. That’s how it happens. Then the catalogs start coming and somehow the shock—the revulsion—passes. You acclimate to the idea. Somehow it seems perfectly normal to be looking at these medieval devices and deciding which you should use on your lover.”

  Emily’s face was flushed with exertion; her hair had slipped loose from its braid and caught in the sweat around her jaw line, lending her the appearance of a sultry monk as she knelt before me. It seemed that she was the one who needed to be comforted.

  “It’s never what you think,” she said. “You can’t keep it in the bedroom.”

  She stood uncertainly on new legs, leaned over, and picked up the ball.

  “I don’t think I can play another game,” she said.

  In the hallway, Emily grabbed her towel and water bottle, then called back to me, “Put some betadine on those cuts.”

  I started stretching my back in the cool hallway outside the court. When I was five, years before my mother destroyed her Camaro, my father had hurried back from the orchards one evening with Therese and spent a long time in the bathroom with my mother. When he came out, he told me my mother was very tired and couldn’t put me to bed that night. But I knew better. I had watched her that afternoon: as she sat, square-legged, in front of the long bathroom mirror, she’d run my father’s razor down her palms until the blood dripped onto the floor and down her arms like melt from a strawberry popsicle. I didn’t see her for several weeks afterward. Therese put me to bed and read me stories. Later I realized it was like we’d been practicing for when my mother was really gone.

  Sessions with Dr. Mya: Day 5

  When I wake this morning, a woman lays parallel to the bed in a cocked recliner that one of the orderlies managed to heave into the room without disturbing me. For some time I cannot believe it is Emily, and make an effort to sit upright, to lean closer, to verify the scar at her eye, the wide mouth, the sleek taper of her body: to obtain tangible proof that my untrustworthy brain has recognized this woman properly; that she actually exists in this chair beside me. If she hadn’t started snoring, I might actually have rung for a nurse, but she does snore and I am certain now.

  For a while, as she sleeps, I kick around a joke about her arrival from France—was she able to fit her dowry into a single coffin, did she have trouble clearing customs?—something in line with her story about the Casket Girls, but I can’t think of anything graceful enough to overcome the maudlin aspect. She’d told me the story of their unusual advent innocently on our first morning together, and cannot have known how often I thought about it afterward. I want to tell her that I’m not one of those girls after all—carrying my legacy in a coffin—there’s the orchard, the stories my mother told me there. The myth of her life among the mango trees, and we must be resident. We must live with our stories. My failings, inscribed as they are on my body, are my own. Somehow I’ve never been able to articulate this, though I came close with Audrey, as close as Icarus.

  One summer evening, Audrey and I left Honolulu Zoo and walked along the tree-lined avenue as dusk gathered around us. From the pavement, the beach stretched to the murmuring shoreline. She held my hand; our fingers knitted together, her short plaid skirt typical and comforting. Under the streetlamps, couples sat on benches or strolled past with dogs on lead.

  “Tell me about the girl,” Audrey said.

  “The girl?”

  “The girl in Ireland. What was her name?”

  “Moira,” I said. “Moira Cunningham.”

  “Tell me a story about her.”

  I told Audrey about the Christmas the dentist had taken me to her parents’ house, the goose they’d prepared and the Jameson we’d drunk, the way their voices waffled on the high notes when they sang. The mother’s black hair cropped elegantly, her face creamy and full with the memory of beauty. The father, red-nosed and jolly, had shaken my hand seriously, earnestly, all the while patting my shoulder. They’d embraced me for Moira’s sake, for her happiness against their cultural impulses, against their very inclinations. Still they’d embraced me.

  “What was she like?”

  I thought of the black-haired girl with her coarse country brogue, eyes dark as peat, her nimble mind so insistent on the precise word, the precise tool. Her flat always in disarray: some carpentry project here, some half-painted room there; our warm and simple life.

  “She was kind,” I said, “and certain of everything. It was remarkable how certain she was.”

  Even as I said this, I was struck again, by the similarities between them: Audrey and the dentist, so much sincerity.

  “Remarkable?”

  “Yes. It takes a lot of conviction in permanence to be certain like that.”

  Audrey stopped, looked at me intently, shook her head. How to explain? How to tell her that I knew nothing of that kind of permanence, that kind of conviction, and how it had terrified me.

  “Do you know what it’s like to live with someone like my mother?”

  She shook her head again, kept my hand clasped in hers. A jogger padded down the sidewalk and into the night.

  “She was gone and then back, gone and then back for weeks at a time. There were scenes and it got so you dreaded going anywhere with her. You had to hide the car keys, give her one pill at a time and make sure she really swallowed it. You had to check under her tongue. For a while we had a special locked drawer for razors and knives. You couldn’t cut a fucking mango without first getting the key to that drawer so you could use the paring knife. Therese threw out all the hand mirrors, and then had to check the mirror in each bathroom, the picture frames, every window in the house and tool shed to make sure she hadn’t broken off a piece of glass.”

  I said this in a low breathless rush, and found I’d crushed her fingers in my hand. I let go now and looked at my palms, the sand on the pavement, the rubbish bin beside the nearest bench. Somewhere beyond us the sea trembled and crawled; I looked at Audrey’s troubled face, the curls childlike and beautiful. I might have touched her, smoothed the skin around her eyes and forehead; instead I told her the rest of the story: “You were always watching her and all the suspicion made her devious. She had to sneak around just to avoid being observed like a science project. And partly you hated her for being sick, for being weak and partly you wanted it to end—the inevitable end you’d sensed all along, that you were just prolonging stupidly, pretending to hope. It was a relief when she died. You were glad. You were glad it was finally over and you hated yourself. You hated yourself, and wondered if it was inside you too: the sickness; and thought you deserved it anyway, thought you deserved to be sick because you were glad she was dead.”

  I kept looking at her, convinced I’d see a change in her expression, convinced she’d pick this moment not to love me.

  She stepped towards me, her hand on my face, and kissed my mouth. A startli
ng kiss, as though she’d lifted me, and I felt my body unfurl—a curious lightening in my belly, in my chest—as I held onto her. Oh, I clung to her, there under the eucalyptus trees, afraid she might lift me too high.

  In my hospital room Emily sleeps on, her head twisted at an uncanny angle until the pug turns up to check my vitals and starts humming some insensible show tune.

  “Hey you,” I say as casually as I can manage with the pug hovering like a pestilence.

  Emily watches Lucy work around me, all solemn efficiency as she scribbles notes in my chart. After dragging the whole procedure out for as long as possible, she finally vanishes from the room and the squeak of her shoes migrates down the hallway to the next poor bastard’s room.

  Emily slides her recliner next to the bed and kneels so that we’re level. She holds my shoulder and smiles at me, her eyes bloodshot and recessed.

  “Hey you,” she says.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in Paris?”

  Her fingertips run across my collarbone, making me tired and hungry simultaneously. Maybe I’m not awake at all.

  “How do you feel?” she asks.

  “Not so bad.”

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  The wells of her eyes—how often could I have drowned in them?

  “Em, take a look at this fucking place: I don’t even want to be here.”

  “If you’d called me, we could have gotten you out of here.”

  “They’ve had me under constant observation—because of the head injury—but it’s really just a suicide watch. I’ve had to meet with this shrink—”

  “Dr. Mya.”

  “So you’ve already heard this story?”

  “I talked to her last night when I arrived. She’s proof the experience hasn’t been all bad.”

  “Don’t bother, she’s straight.”

  “There’s hope for all of them.”

  “My head—don’t make me laugh.”

  “Sorry.”

  She reaches up and touches my forehead like a blessing; I close my eyes and feel the sheet pulled away from me. Her hand slides across the plaster on my arm and stops at my hip.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “A metal brace to hold the pins in my leg. They’re supposed to replace it with a cast.”

  Tentatively, her head inclined, she runs her hand along the metal brace. Freckled and hesitant, her forehead lined with unease, she touches my body as if for the first time. I think I cannot bear this gentleness.

  I know, of course, who told her.

  “He called you in Paris?”

  “He stopped by the house and told Hiromi. He said you’d been badly injured.”

  Has Emily seen this coming all along: me in a hospital bed? Her almond eyes pool for a moment, then she brushes her unkempt hair from her face and coughs.

  “And Grey?” I ask.

  “He’ll fly in this morning. It took me a while to track him down.”

  “He’s ditched the bitch?”

  She nodded, “He’s officially single again. Apparently he’s been at his brother’s lake place the last week or so.”

  Grey waterskiing across the shimmering surface of a lake; I imagine him with a couple of blond college girls driving the boat, admiring his form. How we unravel and gleam.

  “Em, I hate being here.”

  She looks up at me, her lips compressed, her expression surfing through several channels before settling finally on anguish.

  “I know, honey.”

  “They put me on fucking suicide watch.”

  “The scars.”

  “Em.”

  “It’s OK now. You’re going to be OK.”

  I swallow, my throat aching, and strain to collect myself. I don’t know how to ask—how to form the words. Lying back on my pillow, I stare at the dull-white ceiling, steady my breathing.

  “Em, will you do me a favor?”

  “I’ve already called her.”

  On my first vacation to Italy, we’d stopped in Florence for a day trip to see the Uffizi Gallery and Michelangelo’s David and so one of my mates could buy a cheap leather jacket. That day in the square, the students had staged some sort of medieval festival. The boys trudged about, hefting jousts and shield coats fashioned from burlap sacks, with coats of arms dragged behind them by aptly disgruntled serfs. The girls wore elaborately stitched dresses and ornate hairstyles. They waved long handkerchiefs at no one in particular from the pinnacles of their respective turrets. None of it made much sense to me.

  I skirted the square and walked among the market vendors, looking for the entrance to the Uffizi, which I found behind a queue of hundreds of tourists, including a large group of bellowing middle-aged Americans. A girl with ice cream trotted past and I returned, dismally, to the market, searching for the ice-cream stand among the vendors. Policemen in threes strode around on foot, looking oppressively overdressed in their dark outfits and hard black hats. After taking a wrong turn, I ended up in an alleyway between vendors, and before I could turn a man stumbled into the alley from the other side of the market. He wore a crumpled white suit, no hat, and had blood pouring from his chest. He seemed to be walking on the tips of his toes, with his arms puffed out at his sides as if he might take flight. At first, I thought he was a performer with the students’ festival, but then he fell backwards onto the brick of the alleyway and I understood he’d been injured.

  While I stood there, not three meters from him, a group of people noticed the man and called for the police. I walked slowly down the alley, not looking at the man or the crowd, hardly noticing as the police rushed past me with their black sticks drawn. All I could think was that the man’s suit had smelled of goat. Again, I walked toward the museum, and entered through the exit, walking past several security personnel who watched without making any effort to halt me.

  I spent the next five hours wandering through the museum backwards. Obviously the man had been stabbed, probably multiple times, from the blood stains on his suit. I never told anyone about seeing him.

  Without taking notes, Dr. Mya watches me as I tell her this story. She’d come to my hospital room herself to wheel me down to her office, which smelled of cinnamon again. Today she wears a black pantsuit with a sleeveless blue blouse (she has removed her jacket) and has resumed her calm, methodical demeanor—the previous session’s rumpled psychologist a vanished species. I’d meant to explain about Emily, or at any rate I’d wanted to explain things to Dr. Mya, but I told about the goat suit instead. I’m not sure why and when I finish the story, I can’t think of anything else to say.

  “Were you frightened that day in the alleyway?” she asks me.

  “No, just surprised.”

  “You weren’t worried about leaving the scene of a crime?”

  “Who said there’d been a crime?”

  “So the man stabbed himself in the chest?”

  “I didn’t see anything that might have helped them.”

  “If the same thing had happened here, say on Kalakaua Avenue, would you still have walked away?”

  I move the goat suit to Kalakaua, see him falling back within sight of traffic, blood in his mouth, ruining his suit, and the hollowed look in his eyes. I shrug. Who can say?

  “Would you have tried to help him,” she asks, “if the crowd hadn’t called for the police?”

  “I don’t know. It happened quickly: he stumbled in the alleyway, collapsed, and then they were calling for the cops. Fast.”

  I punch my cast against the rail of my chair to illustrate how quickly the incident took place. Watching him fall, it hadn’t occurred to me to call anyone, not even when I understood the blood on his suit was real. I hadn’t moved toward him or away from him, simply watched. Why have I told her this story?

  “Listen, these scars,” I say, “gesturing toward my back with my good arm. They aren’t what you think.”

  She gazes at me, waiting. Behind her, the blinds shield us, except at the edges where light blazes throu
gh. What has Emily told her? What have they said to one another? Emily wants me to recuperate at her house, have a registered nurse live with us during my recovery. Whatever my insurance and UPS won’t pay, she will. “I’ve already made calls,” she said. “Everything’s settled.”

  “I’m a masochist.”

  Dr. Mya’s eyes don’t waver behind her brown-rimmed spectacles. She has an eerie ability to see into you the way a dog does. Maybe she doesn’t understand what I mean.

  “Rough sex,” I say, and gesture toward my back again. “That’s all.”

  “Consensual?”

  “Of course.”

  “Every time?”

  “What?”

  “Was it consensual every time?”

  I stare at her, “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Jane,” she draws my name out in her mouth. “Was the rough sex consensual every time?”

  “I never said no.”

  “Did that mean it was consensual?”

  “Yes.”

  Her pencil spins in her fingers like a pinwheel.

  “Why did you stop seeing him?”

  “I’d started seeing someone else.”

  “Why?”

  “He scared me a little.”

  “You started seeing someone else because Nick scared you a little?”

  “Well, it was more complicated than that.”

  “How did he scare you?”

  I think of the harness, and the climbing rope, the dress belt and the way Nick dug his knee into my spine to pin me. Declensions running through my head like Psalms. Had he scared me? I can’t be sure anymore. More than anything I’d felt helpless, and for some reason, finding Audrey had empowered me. Betrayal had made me feel less vulnerable.

  “Things became confused. The boundaries blurred, you know? At first it was just sex, and then it was the way he talked to me, and ordered for me, his hand on my neck when we were walking, expecting me to move in, to marry him. And he had these contraptions—these devices—and I didn’t even feel present anymore. It’s like I had no identity. I could have been anyone with my hands bound. And by the end it was so fucking horrible, I was afraid to see him. I was afraid to walk into his house because I’d made this agreement. Somehow I’d made this agreement and I didn’t know how to get out of it.”