There was no call. Instead, he was waiting for her on her front stoop. The flowers had softened her by then. She invited him up. She supposed this would be it, their moment: the two of them would melt together and whatever would happen next, would happen next. But this was no soft-focus scene: as soon as she closed the apartment door, he shoved her against the wall, a wooden, owl-shaped key rack mounted next to her head jangling with the force of his motion. One hand against her mouth, the other wrapped around her neck, lightly, but there would be nowhere for her to go, she would be there, under his grip, until he released her. His hand was enormous around her neck. He said quietly, “Never disappear again. You don’t do that. I do that. I’m in charge here, not you. I’m the one running the show. You don’t go anywhere. You stay where I want you. You’re mine.” Then he kissed her.
Beyond terrible, is what she thought as she collapsed into him. No one can save me from him. No one can save me from me. She desired him entirely, every inch, every imperfection, his failures of soul, every ounce of ill will and greed.
He spread her out on the cold Formica kitchen table. Not romantic, she thought. “Could we go to the bed?” she said. The tabletop against her ass and back and thighs. Outside, the cherry blossoms fluttered in the wind. He hoisted her legs up and began to unzip his pants, but then stopped himself. “Not yet,” she heard him mumble, and instead he got her off with his fingers, flipping her over first, and then, expertly, turning her into a panting mess.
As soon as it was over, she wanted it again. She wasn’t unsatisfied. She just wanted more. Give it to me, she thought. Give it all to me.
The next day all she did was think about Victor bending her over on the table. She hadn’t cared about sex, and then she did.
A ring showed up at her office, via messenger. Amethyst, surrounded by diamonds. She showed it to Cora, and they both agreed it was beautiful, and a sign of success. Barbra’s mother examined it and said, warily, “It looks like a nice start.”
* * *
I knew what I was getting, Alex, Barbra thought as she took her nineteen thousandth step of the day.
* * *
Two weeks later she visited Victor in Manhattan. He took her out to dinner at the Four Seasons and checked her into the Waldorf Astoria, all by herself, and tucked her into bed, where he left her to do god knows what, all night long, and a week after that he took her to Connecticut, to the same house from which he had called her. The house was enormous, room after empty room, with a guest house out back and an elegant swimming pool, the tiles of which were covered with a turquoise peacock feather motif. No starter home for them, she thought. This is where you end. He told her if she married him she could fill it with whatever she desired, decorate every last inch of it, make a home for the two of them, and then, at last, on the barren mattress in the master bedroom, they went to bed. His penis was massive, far bigger than she’d seen before. He unfurled it, already hard, from his pants. Well, that she had not known she was getting.
He moved slowly for a minute or two and then took off, fast, a healthy sprint, squeezing her breasts all the while through her shirt.
Her big eyes widened and he pushed himself into her as far as he could go, which was not far enough. “You’re just a little thing, aren’t you,” he said to her fondly. She slept in his shirt. It smelled like him. Bruised inside and outside. She’d never get him off her.
The curtainless windows allowed the moonlight in on them, and all around her was the truth of their flesh. She had fully given in by then, but what choice did she have anyway? He was as close to perfect as anyone would get. A perfect fucking monster, and she loved him.
* * *
As Barbra passed the floor elevator for the forty-seventh time, a nurse moved briskly past her. Wherever she was headed, whatever she would find, it was already happening. Pink scrubs, sensible shoes. A thin nose, broad at the tip. High cheekbones. One tattoo on her hand of a crescent moon. And another on her arm, which said Tracy. It was faded and watery. Barbra would never have let her children get tattoos. A disgrace, a defilement of the body, she thought. Ah yes, the children.
* * *
She hadn’t wanted them; Victor had.
But her body was needed for production. Try one, he said. See what you think. We’ll get help for you. Her mother came, instead, to the small cottage underneath the soaring red maple trees in back of the house, where she lived for the next twenty-two years. Barbra bought her a king-size bed that took up practically the entire bedroom—only the best would do for her—but everything else was old, all the things her mother refused to get rid of, a vase, a lamp, a painting, a chair, dusty and faded, and Barbra would try to buy her everything new new new, and her mother would say, “I don’t need it,” and Barbra would insist she deserved it for all she had suffered in her life, and her mother would say, “Eh, it wasn’t that bad. Easier to not have men around that much, between you and me.” This was something Barbra wanted to believe, but she liked when Victor was around, because this was how she definitively knew she was on his mind, when she was in his field of vision (and he, hers), and it did not matter whether he was being kind to her that day, or whether he was being cruel (they both called these moments of his “being the boss,” as in, “Oh, I can see the boss is here,” which would often lighten the mood, unless it didn’t), because it was all attention, and she craved it from him, and if having a baby would keep him steady in her life, she’d do it, and so she did, and it was done.
It wasn’t the children’s fault they were children, she told herself over and over again. She was just more interested in him. Tall, dark, mysterious, angry, ugly him. Where did he go all day, where did his meetings take him? Where did he stay at night when he didn’t come home? One evening, when Alex was a year old and sleeping through the night, Barbra left the baby with her mother, and she and Victor went into the city to see The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and have dinner at Rao’s, where he knew people, shook hands, nodded, accepted a bottle of champagne sent to the table, and afterward, the driver had sped down the FDR, then headed crosstown to SoHo, where Victor had shown her his pied-à-terre. She had expected it to be nicer. It was a little walkup, with dust and damage everywhere, and it was less a pied-à-terre than a warehouse. Another bed in a room, nothing else around it.
“Let me decorate this for you,” she said.
“It’s just an investment,” he said. “A place to crash when I work late. I don’t need much.” She ached to furnish it. “It’ll be sold by the end of the year,” he said. Fixing it up would be a waste of money. But the following spring she saw their tax returns in his desk drawer, which she had signed without question. Now she looked closely at them. He hadn’t sold anything. What did he do in that empty room? Surely that couldn’t be where he stayed. She hated the idea of it. When she was left behind, all alone, in Connecticut. With this child. So she had another one. A boy.
“Boys are easier,” said her mother, which was true, and also a thing someone says to you when you wanted another little girl instead. And also, boys are easier until they aren’t. And girls aren’t easy until they are. And all of humanity is difficult, hard in our own way, every damn day, and we only get truly easy when we are dead. And even then.
The children couldn’t help it if they screamed and cried and laughed too loudly and were so full of feelings, joys and jealousy and greediness. They whined, too, not their fault, people whined sometimes, not Barbra but others, especially children. Whatever rules applied to her did not apply to them, at least when Victor was away. When he came home, they sat at attention, mesmerized by this stranger, with his dark suits, his one thick gold ring, his scuffless shoes, and his deep voice, and they paid him mind, even if he wasn’t paying them any. The television on in the background. Money lost and made every game. Her mother’s cooking pleased him, he nodded at the food set before him, but that was it. No matter, he was their father. He ran the show. He was the show. They studied him, absorbed him, loved him, rejected hi
m in some cases. But they were all there for it, they were his audience.
“There are good people in the world,” her mother told Barbra once. “You just need to let them in.” The children, still young. There was time yet to leave. Anya hated her daughter’s bruises. “Say what you will about your father, he never hit me.” But Anya didn’t understand all the tacit deals Barbra had made with Victor over the years. How intertwined she was with him financially and emotionally. Accounts in her name. Also, the fact that she was desperately in love with him. She knew his most important secrets, and he knew all of hers.
* * *
Alex, so what if you knew the secrets? What would you do with them? For years, I never quite knew myself.
* * *
A restaurant in Connecticut, 1986. A steakhouse, a scene in and of itself, with the other wives and husbands, the affluence, the laziness, the submission, the dominance. Shoulder pads and diamond earrings and red suspenders and pinstripe shirts and patterned silk ties. What was the news that day? Rich men getting richer. The rising noise, the squall, the tinkling clatter of plates and cutlery and glasses, each ting chipping away at Barbra’s spirit. No one is normal, thought Barbra, something she considered all the time then. We are all equally disturbed. I am only safe with him. Even though he was a threat.
Victor ordered for the whole table, somehow barely acknowledging everyone’s existence. Anya slurping down a rare martini, just to deal with this man for one night. Alex, saucer-eyed like Barbra, a few years left of pure cheer in her; she has not put any of the pieces together yet. Gary, slightly shell-shocked from the little smacks he’s started to receive from his father, supposedly play, but it doesn’t feel like play. Gary is years away from becoming the man he will be, tall and imposing like Victor, but more handsome, and kinder, too, though that is not difficult, being kinder than Victor. As authoritative as Victor, though—they will share that. The little boss.
It was the first time they’d seen him in three weeks, but they were all supposed to pretend it had been just yesterday, and the day before that. He drank a bottle of wine on his own, and a few Scotches. The waitress was slow to bring him the last drink, and Barbra said, “Do you need it anyway, sweetheart?”
“Look at me,” he said. “Look at me—I said look at me.” His hand around her chin. “Do you think I don’t know my own desires and needs?” He moved his hand to her cheek, and she flashed back to that first moment on the beach in Revere. “Do you think you know anything about me at all?”
She whispered, “I do. I know a few things.” But she felt faint and useless. She had done everything he wanted, and tonight it didn’t matter. He was the man who preferred the empty room all along. Not these things, not these children, not her. He wanted his steak and his wine and his Scotch, and a young waitress he could bully to bring it to him, and after that, where he slept didn’t matter. He didn’t apologize to Barbra then, or later, when he struck her in their bedroom. He didn’t need to apologize. He was the boss.
Soon after, he was in the papers. A business acquaintance went down, refusing to testify. There was a piece in the Times about a back office at the Fulton Fish Market. Money was laundered there, and files were held, photos, information, offshore accounts, that sort of thing. He developed buildings, but where did the money come from exactly? Better question: where didn’t it come from? She only learned about it because she got up before he did and read the paper. There was his name, and she gasped. Later, at breakfast, he shook his head. “A good man,” he said to no one. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” He looked up at his family. “Not that I know the guy.”
But he did know the man; she had seen him with her own eyes. Six men, who would come to the house on occasion, arriving by train, an escape from Manhattan, ducking their heads at the station, she imagined, taxis to their house, all of them gathering for hours in the office, pacing in the dining room, smoking cigars and cigarettes in the backyard, consuming all the food and booze in the house, talking, plotting, deciding their fates. All of this was fine in front of her, but not their children and her mother. Witnesses to nothing in particular, yet witnesses nonetheless. She sent Anya and the children quietly to a hotel. A thousand dollars in cash shoved in her mother’s purse.
Charges were filed. All seven men. They went to court. And the prosecutors could prove nothing. Victor’s charges were dropped almost immediately. (There would be more charges to come in later years, in addition to lawsuits over various business practices. Victor could not stop himself, but never, ever was he convicted of any offenses. There was nothing particularly extraordinary about the crimes he committed, Barbra thought, except that when he was caught, he was never held accountable, and even that was no big surprise.) People they knew in the community—they were now fifteen years in deep there—supported her, or at least did not question her. It might have been one of their own husbands. Who among us. A friendly wave at the school drop-off was worth a million. Shana Gottlieb made her a lasagna. Tonya Alverson offered her kids a ride home from school every day for a month. The Gallianos sent over a bottle of champagne at the steakhouse the night his charges were dropped. By all of this, she was touched. Those many years they’d had the house there, raised the kids, shopped in the shops, ate steak in a sea of other chewing, drinking, jawing people, and she hadn’t even known anyone had noticed she was alive. It was him, and her family, and nothing else. This did not change her life. She was still silent and trapped. But at the time, she saw the possibility of not being alone.
Barbra’s mother died a few weeks after Alex’s junior year of college began. It was a quiet death, which Anya would have wanted, no fuss, a heart stops in the night. She lived, and then she didn’t. Still, Barbra was in shock: her closest companion had left her. Barbra had been counting on her mother to live forever.
The children were devastated. Gary immediately flew home from Los Angeles, where he was doing a gap year and working on a film set. Alex was already back from New Haven, and Barbra and Alex picked Gary up from the train station. Alex, red-eyed, was choking on her tears already, and as soon as Gary saw her, he started crying, too, the two of them, in the back seat of the Benz, holding each other, wrenched in deep, heartfelt, noisy pain. You’d think someone had died, thought Barbra, forgetting for the moment that someone had.
“Can you two calm down?” she said.
“I loved Nana,” said Alex.
“Even if you didn’t,” Gary said to his mother.
Which was ridiculous. “Of course I loved her,” said Barbra. Her mother had been her only friend left in the world, and the best she’d had in her life. She swerved along a back road, beneath the tart pink dogwood blossoms, aggressively passing a slow-moving car in front of her on the left. How dare they? She burned, yet said no more. She couldn’t bring herself to flip the switch that would fully correct them: who knew what kind of light it would turn on inside her?
Her children continued to carry on all the way home, howling as if she had smacked them, and out the car door, up the driveway, and through the marble-lined foyer, where she found her husband waiting, pacing, on the phone. He held his hand up to the children to silence them while he continued to speak, but they ignored him, choosing instead to rattle and moan, two haunted, mourning souls missing their nana. It was high drama, and Barbra could not handle it, but she could not seem to get the words out to stop them. Victor looked at them, aghast and furious, and then stalked out of the room toward his study, where he remained for a few minutes before slamming his phone down. It could be heard where they stood. Gary and Alex leaned forehead to forehead as their sobs settled. Victor strode back into the room—a storm cloud in a pinstripe suit—and leered over his two children and began to yell.
“You two think that something happens in the world, it deserves this big, intense reaction. Like your feelings mean more than anyone else’s. Look at your mother. It was her mother. Who died. And look at how she handles things. With grace and elegance and not every feeling needs
to be felt at the top of your goddamn lungs. She should be your role model, and instead you two are whooping and screaming like a couple of monkeys.” He pushed his two children apart. “Get out of here. Go to your room.” Stunned, Gary and Alex wandered toward the staircase. “And she was eighty-two. Idiots. You don’t mourn that. She was old. She lived a nice long life in comfort.” He put his arm around Barbra. “I should have picked them up from the train station. I apologize.”
He was always rescuing her when people died. That was his strength. Death. Mortality had never meant anything to him. “It’s because I know we’re just renting this body,” he had told her once. “It’s just a suit.” She was certain that was why he was so successful at business. He was a mercenary. He took what he wanted. There was no time to waste.
“And I’m sorry,” he continued, “that our children don’t know the right way to be sad.” It had been a long time since Barbra had felt anything for her husband besides a basic tolerance, but that was all it took for her to love him madly all over again. She dabbed a small tear from her eye. Later that evening, she gave him a scrupulous blowjob, to which he said nothing until right before shutting off the light for the night. “Thank you,” he said. “No, thank you,” she said. They both fell asleep immediately, and in each other’s arms.
After the funeral, she held shiva in their living room. All of her mother’s friends and relatives showed up. She remembered half of their names; she kissed and nodded and faked it. Barbra loved this room: it was the brightest in the house, though you couldn’t tell it now with the dark velvet curtains drawn closely together. Every two years she reinvented it. She would ask for money, and Victor would give it to her. She would buy new furniture and dispense with the old in various ways—donations, private dealer sales, gifts to various family members, some of whom were in the room at that moment. Objects were both treasures and disposable. She wanted things, and then she was bored with them, and then she wanted more. When she stopped to think about it, she felt sick, as if she were a sick human being who would never feel healthy, only temporarily sated. But she did not stop to think about it often.
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