Carried Away

by Whitney Williams

  By the time we arrived in London, I could walk a little bit if someone put me on my feet. I’d spent the entire train ride massaging and stretching my legs. They were somewhat better, but the rest of me remained despondent.

  Gretchen’s feet in ruby-red, `no place like home` pumps met us at the platform. They skipped toward Henry but stopped when they saw me: salty wetsuit, tangled hair, fins hanging from my zipper pull. I could see her feet trying to form a question when Henry spoke.

  “She swam the channel.”

  One foot didn’t believe it and leaned over to confer with the other, which stood resolute. After a moment of discussion between them, both feet looked upset. One of them started to move toward Henry but it stopped, not entirely sure how it felt about him.

  “Not my idea,” he said.

  The forward foot withdrew, dissatisfied with that answer. “You let her?”

  “No.” The feet got very angry very quickly and started toward me. “No,” Henry stopped them, “it’s done.” Neither foot liked that, but they carefully fell into formation alongside Henry’s and walked to the car.

  Drawing out his silence on the train, neither he nor Gretchen said a word all the way to the hotel. She had a separate room, but she followed us to Henry’s suite, clearly unwilling to leave him alone with me who had caused him such worry. He sat down at the desk in the sitting room, opened a folder that she had given him, and started reading. She sat on the couch, watching him. She didn’t want to look at me any more than I was able to look either of them in the eye.

  The hours since I had crouched on the platform in Dover, wishing I could crawl into a hole and die of shame, had only given my guilt time to compound, multiplying itself by every kindness he had ever shown me. Facing Gretchen, all she had done for me, I knew she considered my offense against Henry to be a personal attack on her, magnified by the worshipful lens through which she saw him. She deserved better than what I had done. I felt so terrible.

  I didn’t know what to do. First of all, I was filthy. I took off my wetsuit and cleaned myself up. My feet were in bad shape. Neoprene boots aren’t made for walking. I certainly couldn’t ask Gretchen to go get me bandages, so I wrapped them in washcloths under soft cotton socks. After fishing out the socks and wrapping my feet, I sat back against my trunk. There had to be a way for me to apologize, some sign of contrition comparable in magnitude to my remorse. Punishment would have felt so much better in a way. I would have felt like I had paid up the balance of my crime. Henry’s forgiveness and Gretchen’s unhappy extension of it left me no such comfort.

  I couldn’t say anything for fear of having my offense described to me, and I knew that would be awful to hear. I decided to try genuflection. I had used my body to get this far, and it remained my most powerful asset. I turned around and dug into my trunk, searching for anything I could use to look more subservient. I remembered there being a ball gag in with the lingerie and toys, and that would at least excuse me from having to answer for what I had done.

  There were also padded leather restraints, thick cuffs that buckled around my wrists and ankles with D-rings mounted on them as a dog’s collar would have for attaching a leash. I also found a similar collar. Then I found the leash. If that doesn’t scream “I’ll do anything,” I don’t know what does.

  I braided my hair into loose pigtails then tried to stand up. As I looked around for something to hold while I dragged myself to my feet, I realized that was a step not necessary for successful execution of my plan. Besides, any excuse not to use my injured feet seemed quite convenient. Holding my leash in one hand so as not to drag it behind me, I crawled into the sitting room.

  I crawled up behind the chair in which Gretchen sat. I wasn’t quiet, dragging the tops of my feet along the carpet behind me, but she was startled when I draped the leash over the arm of her chair. Her feet shifted to point away from me; she was ignoring me. I imagine her face must have filled in red from the bottom up like a cartoon character until steam shot out her ears. My collar jerked forward sharply, pulling me up onto my knees and around in front of her. A muffled squeak escaped when her first spanking hit me, pushing me forward and leaving a sharp, lingering sting. She hit me hard.

  Her almost grunting breaths quickened as she hit me again and again. It must have hurt her hand too. She started lashing me with the end of the leash, jerking my neck up as she raised it to swing harder. She unhooked it from my collar and stood over me. It felt like she had doubled it over twice in her hand. A few words snuck out under her breath while she whipped me mercilessly, and none of them were kind. It felt as good as I had hoped, like she was converting her anger into my pain, and I wanted desperately to drain away her anger.

  She beat me harder and faster as she released her rage until I was crouched down, shielding my head and neck with my hands and she loomed over me, striking fast, searching for any swatch of skin not yet fully destroyed.

  “Gretchen,” Henry calmly said.

  As soon as she suddenly stopped, I heard my own attempts to scream. The leash hit me hard one last time when she threw it down at me and stormed into the bedroom, still unwilling to leave me alone in the suite with Henry. I was genuinely surprised not to see blood on it. I crawled into a corner, curled up, and waited for Henry to call me to bed. He never did. That hurt too.

  In the morning, he and Gretchen got dressed and left without speaking to me. I spent the entire day stretching and rubbing my aching muscles. He didn’t come back that evening. I waited until about 3:00 a.m. then made a little bedroll for myself from a spare blanket and pillow since the suite didn’t have a doghouse.

  I hope he was with Gretchen. I left him alone when he came in the next morning to change clothes, waiting for him to say something to me. Then I spent another day stretching, then another, then another.

  When I had put on the collar and cuffs, I felt a little mischievous streak in me that wanted my submission to turn sexual, then Henry might fuck me violently and spray his rage into me. Even while Gretchen beat me, some part of me waited to feel pleasure folded in with the pain. It wasn’t like that. She was angry. It wasn’t a game. The calm and merciful way Henry ended it rubbed his forgiveness in with yet another exercise of kindness I did not deserve. The moral respite I craved from punishment faded quickly after the blows stopped.

  I worried. Henry’s silence might have been punishment in kind, but for the fact that I had his luggage. At least I knew he would come back. Probably.

  Finally he brought Gretchen in with him one night and took her to bed, leaving me on my little mat in the sitting room. When they woke up the next morning, they acted like nothing had been wrong. Gretchen even picked out a dress for me to wear and gushed over how pretty I was when I put it on. I’ll never know what happened, what they decided. As for me, I spent four days completely alone with my thoughts. For those four days, my thoughts were not kind to me.

  They brought me out of purgatory for a picnic brunch on an uncommonly beautiful Saturday morning. We sat under a tree in Jubilee Gardens, listening to the buskers and watching the Eye roll slowly around. I got the impression that every building in London was somehow historically significant and at least a hundred years old, but that’s really only true along the banks of the Thames. London, like Paris, seemed to be an endless forest of renaissance architecture. Every way I looked there was some palace or museum or garden. Unlike Paris, we went into several.

  They humored me well into the afternoon, strolling me through all the attractions, which I had never seen before. Gawking around Westminster Cathedral in amazement, I collided with Henry’s back. I was following him and he stopped. We were down at the long end of the nave. One of the tombs had fresh flowers all around it, which was odd. The floor of the cathedral is quite literally paved with tombstones, many of which are so worn down by foot traffic that the inscriptions are no longer legible. This one looked brand new.

  Gretchen stood next to a long rack of candles, set back several yards from the tomb. She
took a white votive from a box on the floor, lit it, and placed it in the rack with the others. Then she walked up next to the slab and knelt.

  BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY

  OF A BRITISH WARRIOR

  UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK

  BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG

  THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND

  AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY

  11 NOV: 1920…

  The inscription goes on. It marked the center of a bubble of solemnity in the cathedral. Everywhere else, tourists were walking around, taking pictures, talking to one another. Not there. As I finished reading the inscription, Gretchen kissed the fingers of one hand, leaned over the floral border and gently pressed them to the marble. Then she stood and we left.

  As we walked out Victoria Street looking for a place to have a late lunch, I wondered about Gretchen. I thought I knew the story of her life. She told me back at the beach house. She had said nothing about any family or friends in the military, much less killed or missing. When she told me how young she was when she met Henry, I assumed she had spent her whole life with him. In fact, I didn’t even know how old she was, how many years ago that had been. I knew a little bit about her, and I had filled in the blanks. Clearly there was much more to her story than I supposed.

  When we sat down for lunch, I decided to let go of who I thought she would be and try to find out who she really was.

  “Gretchen,” I asked cautiously, “may I ask you a question?”

  She answered, “Of course, Love.” But Henry’s eyes flared and he shook his head slightly. He must have known I wanted to ask about the tomb and known she would not be comfortable talking about it. I had only an instant to make something else up.

  “Where did you grow up?” I was pleased with that. It was a fair question, especially because I had noticed her adopting a slightly more pronounced accent while we were in London. I didn’t really think of the way she spoke as British, but she did sound kind of like the people there.

  “Little village called Swindon, about a hundred and twenty kilometers west of here. We moved to the City when I was thirteen.”

  Ouch. Just in time for the wreck in which she lost her parents. I had dodged one uncomfortable topic by bringing up another. Turning to Henry, I tried to dodge again. “What about you?”

  Without hesitation, he answered matter-of-factly, “I was imbued with life in the laboratory of a Swiss alchemist.”

  “You were not!” Humorously scandalized, Gretchen turned to him and slapped his arm in disbelief, then she clarified for my benefit, “He was not.”

  “Terrified by what he had done, my creator abandoned me.”

  “Oh you poor dear,” Gretchen mocked. “Hated and feared, were we?” Her accent definitely sounded British through her laughter: ‘a’ed an’ fea’d, we’e we?

  “I was hated and feared by the villagers,” he began.

  “There we are!”

  After letting her interrupt, he continued, “Hated and feared by the villagers because I lacked the single defining characteristic of humanity.”

  Gretchen, still laughing, attended to his fiction with derisive interest. “Oh, and what was that, Darling, hmm?”

  “Imperfection.”

  “Imperfection!” She laughed. “Of course! And aren’t you the lucky one then that I’m brave enough to face your brilliance!”

  “It speaks well of you,” Henry admitted. They were a cute couple having an adorable little argument. I couldn’t help but smile. Henry turned to me and asked where I was from.

  I liked the way he had declined to answer the question, so I decided to claim one of my own favorite stories. “I was hewn from marble by a Greek sculptor.”

  Gretchen laughed musically again. “Splendid, Love, splendid!” Then she turned her mockery on me and asked worriedly, “You weren’t abandoned by your creator too, were you?”

  “No,” I answered. “He prayed to Aphrodite for a living bride like me. When he returned home and kissed me, I became flesh.”

  She smiled and giggled as I spoke. When I finished, she looked me dead in the eye, and her smile faded. “And did Pygmalion ever tell you why he carved you?”

  I didn’t know that part of the story, but the look on Gretchen’s face gave me a sinking feeling that it would not be flattering. I braced myself and stepped into the trap. “No, he never did.”

  “He swore off human women forever after witnessing an act of prostitution, a woman subverting a man’s desire for her own gain. He carved a statue to have the beauty of femininity without that cruel spirit of malicious seduction and use. But these things, they never work out, do they? His own lifeless marble seduced him. He made offerings, sacrifices, for a hunk of earth with no soul. And then,” she said, “he was stuck—with you.”

  Thus landed Gretchen’s rebuke. She hit hard. She was still angry, and it still wasn’t a game. Henry said nothing, letting her have my awkward silence while her judgment hung heavy in the air. He gave her my downcast eyes, my rising blush, the webs of bright red blood vessels creeping in across the corners of my eyes and the tremor in my voice when I spoke.

  “I know,” I began.

  “I wanted to be the woman he imagined, but I was already someone else, someone who had never thought of anyone but herself before. Sometimes I wish I were still made of stone so I could never hurt him again. Being human is harder than I thought it would be. You make it look so easy. I’m not cut out for it. Maybe someday I can learn. I don’t know.”

  --Gretchen--

  Dear Diary,

  I always try very hard not to be angry or upset. Right now I am failing. I chartered a boat to take Henry and the girl across the Channel. She swam across. She must have snuck out of his hotel room in the middle of the night, stolen the wetsuit I had custom made for her and the fins I gave her and just swam out into the ocean without telling anybody. She is lucky to be alive, very lucky.

  She’s also lucky that Henry waited for her. That’s the part I hate the most. He must have sat there for hours and hours all alone, not knowing if she was dead or alive. I wish I could have been there with him. I wonder if I would have been able to stay calm. Probably so but only for his sake. He doesn’t act like he is angry at her, but he knows I am. He won’t even let me tell her how wrong she was to do that to him. She knows she should not have done it, but she cannot possibly know how much it hurts. She doesn’t know what it’s like when someone doesn’t come home, when you wait and wait, when you wonder what happened. How long do you wait before getting worried? How long do you wait before giving up, accepting the unthinkable? Can you go to sleep without knowing? Will you wake up to a policeman knocking on your door to tell you they were killed? What do you do then?

  I don’t want to remember what that’s like. I wish I didn’t know. He knows how I feel, but he hasn’t said anything. He’s sitting here now. He hasn’t left me by myself for two days since then. He thinks I’m scared. Maybe I am a little bit, but I’m mostly angry.

  I don’t want to hate her. I was so happy those days at the beach house. I thought things were going to be OK. I thought she was a part of that, that she had brought Henry closer to me somehow. I almost loved her for it. If she didn’t mean to hurt him like this, then she didn’t mean that either. She doesn’t care about anyone other than herself at all. I want Henry to love again, but not her. She’ll hurt him again and again, and every day, I’ll have to watch. I don’t know if I can bear it.

  - gg

  --Eurydice--

  When we returned from the crematory, Yumiko-sensei held me back as Henry entered his suite and let the door close behind him. Her brow furrowed, wrinkling her emotionless mask. She was worried.

  “I cannot stay,” she said. “Come. I have separated the far room. You will remain there until I can send someone for him.”

  As I followed her helplessly to the next door down, I felt him slipping away from me, from everything. I couldn’t leave him. I wouldn’t. No, truthfully,
I couldn’t. Yumiko-sensei had been right about my selfishness the night before. I did want to be close to him, yes, that was part of it. I also wanted him not to suffer the way he did, or at least not to suffer alone. If I was to convince her, it would have to be on her terms. I carefully drained my face of expression and my heart of selfishness before I halted and spoke.

  “Yumiko-sensei, is this a time when he must be alone?”

  As her hand reached out to open the door through which she was about to throw me, she halted too. “No, Child, it is not.”

  “Then I must go to him.”

  She turned to look at me. Her face was a mask again, but there was obviously something beneath it. “If you go to him, he will hurt you.”

  “Then he must hurt me.” I met her gaze and waited, standing in silence. Nothing else I could have said would have had any bearing on her decision or any favorable effect on her perception of me. I had driven straight to her point as hard as I could, and I rested my case.

  In a moment like that, you can usually see the gears turning in a person’s head. Nothing moved in Yumiko-sensei. She wasn’t thinking about what I said. She was watching me, waiting, measuring.

  “So be it.”

  The damning tone in which she granted my request scared me. I opened the door slowly and carefully, peeking inside. Henry stood in the middle of the room, as if he had drifted in rudderless and stopped where he ran aground. I slipped in and swung around the door to stand just inside it. As I closed it, I let the latch scrape loudly against its strike plate and pop into place so he would know I was there. I could only see his back, but he truly did look lost. I decided to put him to bed.

  I eased up beside him and gently enclosed his arm with my hands to lead him. He yanked away from me and wheeled around so abruptly, I jumped back, losing my balance then catching myself on the suite’s wet bar along the wall beside me. He didn’t yell. He spoke powerfully and without restraint, packing the tiny room tightly full of his booming voice and raising a finger as if to pin his accusation on me.