by Lisa Taddeo
—Jesus, I said. I was trembling all over.
—The next morning we both woke with terrible hangovers and started to rework it in our brains that she was raped. Not violently, but that she was taken advantage of while under the influence of a very powerful drug, and I had come to the room too late to stop it. That was our story. In a sense, it was the truth.
He coughed. I looked at the thick blue veins on his wrist, the watch twinkling across them.
—I am sure, Leonard said, you can guess what comes next.
In fact, I had no idea what came next.
—Weeks passed. She took one of the home tests. She already knew because her breasts ached. Her mouth was full of spit. She couldn’t hide her happiness. That was the hell.
He began to shake.
—We could have pretended it was mine. No one would have questioned it. It was the happiness in her that I couldn’t take. The happiness that someone else had put there. And so we decided and yet we never discussed it out loud. I said, Let Dr. Menta see you. She knew only a bit about Dr. Menta, but it was enough. All right, she said. She said she would drive herself to the appointment. She would get a drink first at the Beverly Hills Hotel and wanted to be alone. I paced the house all that day. I couldn’t read or eat. The day was overcast. I pictured her driving through the fog down the canyon. Part of me hoped for a car accident, something absolving. She came back late, past nine.
—Darling, you said, did you do it? You didn’t, and that’s all right.
—Yes, I said exactly that, I believe, how did you—
—Go on, finish, I said, surprised that men always seemed not to know it when you hated them.
—She didn’t do it and I told her it was all right and she cried out in gratitude. She wanted a child at any cost.
—She wanted that child, I said, because she already knew who it was.
—Perhaps, he said, stroking his wattle.
—You did something.
—Yes. I did something terrible.
I shook my head back and forth, vibrating with wrath.
—This canyon is full of the types, you know, their pebbles and sands and crystals. The Bulgarian at the dry cleaner whom I’d known for years. Her breath you could smell from ten feet away. As though she ate bugs and dirt. One morning, along with my pressed shirts, she handed me a little brown sack and inside were two vials, one of black cohosh and one of blue.
—You old sick fuck.
—You know what they do?
I knew. In the hospital once a woman had tried to induce labor with blue cohosh. She’d been ten days past her due date and could no longer tolerate the heartburn. But she was allergic to cohosh. She died during the emergency cesarean. I spent most of the night outside the nursery watching her baby, who had a full head of rich black hair.
—That night I made Lenore her tea, Lenny continued, only it was steeped in triple the recommended dosage of both.
—She had no idea.
—No, I believe she had some idea.
—And she bled.
—She bled so much I was afraid she would die. It started in the middle of the night. The coyotes began to circle and howl, and then the contractions began, and after an hour of screaming and pain, it came out of her. A seahorse shape, blue and red. She held it to her breast, gently, and kissed its alien skull. Even in my fear and guilt, I felt the rage. Another man’s seed at Lenore’s breast. Within seconds the thing died.
I nodded. I’d made my decision. But I wouldn’t give him the slightest of hints. I smiled. I patted the wrist that wasn’t wearing the watch.
—There, I said. Do you feel better now?
He nodded. Hideously, he was grateful.
—Thank you, Joan.
—Go home. Take a nap. Somewhere in heaven, Lenore is smiling.
I took his arm roughly, pushed him in the direction of his tiny home, then turned and opened my door.
Of course he made an attempt to follow me, so I quickly shut the door in his face and returned inside, rageful, only to find Eleanor wearing my white slip dress. It was straining at her chest. I couldn’t believe it.
—Eleanor, what the fuck.
—What? she asked. She was existentially frightened of me.
—That’s my special dress, I said.
—Oh. I didn’t know. Sorry.
—It’s my mother’s. Please take it off.
She pulled it off. Underneath she wore her cheap underwear and bra.
—I’m really sorry.
I boiled water for tea and she walked to the area on the floor where she kept her things. She dressed in her own clothes and then, with a smile on her face, something I’d never seen, told me that she felt okay that day, for the first time since her brother’s passing.
I told her how happy I was to hear that, and truly, I was.
—And I’m grateful to you for getting me the job and for letting me stay here.
I wanted to say that I’d never agreed, that she’d come and never left. Instead I nodded kindly.
—And. I forgive you.
Involuntarily, tears filled my eyes.
—Yeah. And I wanted to tell you. I feel good having you in my life. I know that sounds weird.
—No, I get it.
—Also, I’m really excited about the baby. It’s getting closer and maybe that’s why. I don’t want to be creepy or whatever. But I love him already.
I nearly spilled the hot water on my legs. I turned from her and crushed three Xanax between my fingers and dropped them into her cup.
—Here. I made some tea.
She never refused anything I made her. I thought of all the times I’d cooked for her father, his fawning gratitude. The careful way that he chewed.
She smiled as she took it from me and thirty minutes later she was passed out on the couch. I sprayed down the white slip with Big Sky’s cologne to mask Eleanor’s sweat and walked to River’s door.
* * *
FOR MANY YEARS MY RAGE was dormant. I’d lived to survive. I could call up the hideous event, but in a far-off way. I could have dictated only the facts. I could not have called up each moment of horror. Back then not a second went by that I didn’t feel like something was eating my heart. But in the Canyon the pain turned to rage and the rage was growing around me the way the sunbaked bougainvillea grew around the old swingers’ mansion.
I’d never fucked a man to get back at a woman. I’d flirted with the boyfriend of a friend to check my power, though only after the friend had hurt me, had flaunted some faux happiness in my face to make herself feel better. This was new. Alice had not theoretically done anything to hurt me. She’d removed herself from my life but not out of spite. She simply didn’t want to be near me. That’s the most awful thing someone you love can do.
I knocked on River’s door. He opened it, shirtless. I told him my air-conditioning had broken and that I couldn’t stand the heat. I asked if he had anything cold in his fridge to drink. I had nothing in mine.
—Yeah, of course, come in, he said.
His bed was unmade and Kurt was lying on top of it.
—Is beer okay?
I nodded and he pushed lime halves into two bottles of Corona with his calloused thumb. He said, Cheers, we clinked the glass, and his thick pink lips covered the whole mouth of the bottle.
—So that girl, is she like a friend?
—She’s the little sister of my good friend back in New York. Their dad just died and she came out here to get away.
—That’s why I came out here, too.
—Is your mom still in Nebraska?
—Yeah, but she’s good. She’s seeing this dude. He’s a good guy. I’m happy for her.
—That’s good.
—Yeah, it’s pretty great.
—The last time I was in here, I said, sitting down on his bed and stroking the dog’s head.
He laughed nervously. The thing with Alice was apparently becoming serious. I understood that he felt guilty, and that if I ref
erenced our intimacy, he would pull away.
—The last time I was in here, Kurt wasn’t.
—Oh, yeah, he said. He was grateful I didn’t say anything else. I also knew that would make him want me more. The notion that I might have forgotten the way he made love.
I crossed and uncrossed my legs. The dress made a V shape between my thighs—a gleaming silk triangle. It was impossible for him to avert his eyes. I drank half the bottle. I could feel the heat growing between us.
—I wish there was a pool or something, I said. Do you know the song “Nightswimming”?
—Fuck yeah. That’s a great song. I’ll play it.
—That’d be great.
He played the song. I lay down on his bed and cuddled with Kurt and swayed my bent legs left and right to the music. The dog was a very good dog. He liked to lie against a warm human body but he wasn’t needy. He didn’t smell or shed. He was smart and loyal. He never left River’s side, even when they were mountain running. I’d never known a dog that good. I thought how lucky Alice was to have a kind and good-looking boyfriend with a perfect dog. The fact she was able to have that was because of the particular love she’d been given by her single mother. I believed that with my whole heart.
By the end of the song River was lying beside me and our legs were interwoven. We kissed like high schoolers for nearly half an hour before I leaned in to his ear and told him to please put it everywhere.
28
—I FEEL SICK, ELEANOR SAID the next day when finally she woke from her drugged slumber. What time is it?
—It’s noon. Maybe you have the flu. It’s going around.
—I missed work.
—I called in for you. Steve opened. You can go in now. Or I can if you don’t feel well.
—I wish you could just stay home.
—One of us has to work.
She nodded and got up. She pulled her hair back and walked groggily to the door.
—You’re not going to shower?
—I’ll shower later.
She walked out of the door in a way that recalled all the times I’d walked out of Big Sky’s door when his wife was at their country house in the Hudson Valley or at the cabin in Montana. I walked out with the fear that he was glad I was leaving. The fear that I might never see him again.
Big Sky and his wife lived at the Montana house most of the time now, and when I found out the location of Alice’s retreat, I began to pick at the skin on my deformed thumb. My father had deformed me. I’d had a wart on the finger and my father had picked up my thumb and turned it. He said that warts did not go away with the creams I was using, and he brought out a little laser, like a crème brûlée flare, and burned half of my thumb off. But the wart was also gone.
I went to rip off little pieces of skin that grew over the deformity. I looked at a map of Montana. The retreat was less than a half hour from Bigfork, from their six-bedroom lodge on Flathead Lake, with the kayaks and the water skis tied to a giant oak that grew out of the water. There was a grand main residence with all local woodwork, with stone showers, and with a kitchen that made my chest hurt. And then there was a small but gorgeously appointed cabin on stilts over the water where he sometimes slept alone to hear the lapping of the lake against the pebbles he’d had specially imported from a place in Sandpoint, Idaho. In the beginning he told me he slept in the lake house to think unmolested of me. And I would picture him staring up at the log ceiling, stroking himself and wishing I were there.
I had told Alice where the house was. I’d pulled it up on my phone, the old listing with the photos I’d studied as though there would be a test about my former lover’s real life. I’d told her about the grocery store where he bought his big cuts of beef. It’s no organic market, he’d said, but they know their ribs. Johnny, the meat guy, he knows his ribs.
It was the next day when River knocked on my door. I’d never seen him look sad.
—What’s wrong?
—I told her. I told Alice.
—You told her what?
—About what we did.
—Oh.
—Yeah. It’s terrible.
—Why did you tell her?
—Because I couldn’t live like that. I pretty much love her.
—Why are you telling me?
—Because you’re friends.
—Not really anymore, I said. I felt faint and I didn’t think it was from the pregnancy. I heard my burden come to the door.
—May I have a moment? I hissed at Eleanor. It was the first time I’d snapped at her. I went outside and closed the door behind me.
—She’s really upset. I think she hates me.
—Well, you cheated on her.
He looked like he was about to cry.
—She’s leaving for her retreat in a few days. She said she’d think about whether she could forgive me. But either way she wasn’t going to be exclusive with me for a while.
—Why are you telling me this?
—I don’t know, he said. I have no one else to tell.
—So go tell your dog, I said. I walked back inside my house and slammed the door.
* * *
I WROTE HER THAT DAY.
I didn’t know about the two of you.
Predictably, there was no reply. I felt remorse but not really. Mostly I felt fear. I closed my eyes and saw her at the Whitefish Farmers’ Market, carrying a baguette and a bouquet of poppies. Big Sky would be coming from the opposite direction with a brown bag of tomatoes and basil. Then the pink fucking.
And all I had was this lump of a child on my couch. I kept checking my phone for a reply. Alice would know I’d be doing that. I’d told her all the sad things I did.
I took Eleanor to the place that Alice was supposed to take me—Cold Spring Tavern, a former stagecoach stop, up in San Marcos Pass.
We drove until we found an ivy-covered wooden house on a main road set in the woods. Dark smoke rose from the chimney through the tall trees. You couldn’t see the sky. There were old wooden picnic tables and a bearded man flipping big red steaks on a charcoal grill. Motorcycles were parked in diagonal formation as far as the eye could see.
It was so romantic inside the place that I wanted to kill myself. Red-checked tablecloths, oppressive candles, dusty Tiffany lamps, mounted deer busts. The first thought I had was how I wished to be there with Big Sky, how I wished to dance with him in the middle of the afternoon, to fuck in the woods behind the bar or in the charming, slightly scummy inn down the street.
I felt crazy, I have to tell you, the craziest I have ever felt. I had to stifle my laughter. Eleanor would say something serious and I’d laugh and laugh. The kind of laugh where the whole body moves like a rung bell. She looked at me oddly but then she would smile, too. Everybody just wants to be happy.
We sat inside and ordered a couple of lagers and the tri-tip steak sandwiches. When the bartender dropped off the beer, I smelled expensive marijuana on his breath. Eleanor was wearing a t-shirt with a palm tree on it and a pair of khaki shorts that fit too tight around her thighs.
—This is the coolest place I’ve been, she said. She was given to saying things like that without the corresponding expression of happiness on her face.
I agreed that it was.
—Thank you for bringing me here.
—Well, I think we both were having some cabin fever.
—Do you like that guy who lives in the yurt?
—We had sex a couple of times. He’s good in bed.
Those words looked like they’d hurt her.
—Can you do that? she asked.
—What do you mean? I asked, laughing but annoyed.
—Like, when you’re pregnant.
Sometimes I would forget I was pregnant, and anyhow I couldn’t believe a child would linger in there. I was sure that at any moment my body would dispel it.
I told her of course you can.
—The penis doesn’t, like, poke the baby?
—No, Eleanor. Anyway, he di
dn’t put it in that hole.
Predictably, this shocked her. She tried not to show it. She tried to pretend she was mature.
—So you like him?
—Do you like being a virgin?
She shrugged, taking a sip of her beer. The sandwiches arrived, sloppy and beautiful, with apple horseradish on the side. We ate them without speaking. She wiped up steak blood with the crust of the bread. I never finished all my food. My mother told me to always leave a little bit on the plate.
Once we were done, we walked outside with fresh beers and sat on the logs and the motorcycle men stared at me. The kind of staring that never stopped. I had the deplorable thought that I wanted one of them, the largest one, to fuck the baby out of me.
—I’m worried about sex, Eleanor said.
—Honestly it’s nothing.
—I mean that I don’t know who I am.
—In what way?
Very quietly she told me that sometimes she felt like a girl who liked women and other times she felt like a boy who liked women and still other times she felt like something in between who just wanted to be loved. That it was a painful feeling. That she walked around with it all the time, hanging from her neck.
I asked her if her mother knew and she laughed and I asked her if her father had suspected it; he had mentioned to me once or twice that he was safe for the time being since Eleanor did not seem interested in boys, so he did not need a shotgun for date nights. He was always acting the part of the insanely protective father. Because that was what I missed about mine. I had to confront what protective meant—whether I had, in fact, been protected. Physically protective was one thing. Any father could own a shotgun.
Before she could answer, one of the motorcycle men came over and leaned down between us, his hands on the log table, his arms too close to us both.
—What’s cookin, ladies?
I saw the rape in his eyes. I was wearing my white dress and laughed to myself, thinking how anyone would say I kept asking for it. I’d opined often with other women and with men that every man has a degree of rape in him. Women didn’t understand what I meant. They were alternately disgusted and confused. They thought I was stupid. But the men didn’t. I think they were impressed that I understood.
