A Perfect Wife and Mother

by Peter Israel

  The Witch said, “You can get men with your twat, but you’ll never have a real woman friend.”

  Who knows, maybe she was right?

  One hot day last summer, I drove out to Bernardsville. It took less than an hour. I don’t know what I had in mind, it was just an idea. Something to do. Maybe I thought I’d catch her in bed with someone new. Just to see the look on her face when she saw me.

  I’d say, “Who’s the evil promiscuous bitch now?”

  Or I’d just lock her in the closet maybe.

  I parked on the road and walked up the lane barefoot between the hedges, in shorts and a halter top. As soon as I saw the house, I started to lose my nerve. I mean, I was free, wasn’t I, sort of? What was I doing, for God’s sake, tempting fate? When I hadn’t see her in almost two years? When I’d sworn I never wanted to see her again, as long as I lived?

  Tough shit, I was there. Go stick it to her, Becca.

  Three or four cars, including a new-looking Mercedes, but I didn’t see a soul, although, once inside, there were noises from the kitchen. A TV, I thought. When I was little, I liked to watch the soaps down there with the cook.

  I sneaked upstairs, and down the long hall where she used to march me. I tiptoed down to her bedroom. It was all frilly, pink and white and pillowy, scented just the way I remembered it, as though she could hide how stinking she was with expensive eau de cologne. Her bed was empty, though—too bad. So was my room, naturally. Everything there was pretty much the same—what did I expect?—except neater. She must have gone through the drawers, throwing my stuff out. I got as far as my bathroom, the far mirrored door, but when I opened that just enough to see the old furniture in the next room, chairs piled on chairs, and whiffed the same awful musty smell, I chickened out. For a second I imagined the closet, I didn’t have to see it. Then I retreated the way I’d come, past all the closed-off rooms nobody ever used, and back down the great main staircase, half-expecting to bump into one of the Spanish maids—“So, La Señorita, you coming down for lunch today?”—and it wasn’t until I stole through the library that I spotted her.

  She was lying by the pool, alone, on her back, her chaise in the flat position. I could see the top of her head, dyed hair glinting in the sun. Burn, baby, burn, but her flesh would be oily with sunscreen. I remembered standing one time almost in the same place, with Uncle Mark, watching her. That other, hallucinating summer. His arms around me. We’d just been fucking upstairs on her bed, and I was still half-stoned, and I remember him chuckling in my ear. “Do you think we should tell her?”

  The memory almost made me giggle.

  I watched her from the library windows, and I didn’t feel a thing. She didn’t move. Either she was dead or asleep. It was very hot outside. A blinding sun sent little waves and shimmers all across the concrete to the bath house.

  But then, while I watched, one arm moved off the chaise. It came out sideways, groping for her drink. She didn’t even look, just groped, found the glass, pulled it to her mouth.

  Gin.

  I could all but smell her breath.

  Fumes of gin.

  Then I realized I was shaking. Standing still, but shaking. Too afraid to move, too full of rage, something. And my brain immediately kicked into overdrive—what was I doing there? suppose Robert had been calling me? suppose he was coming early and I wasn’t home?—and I remember thinking somehow there is always somebody worse than the last one, and I ran, back out the side way I’d come in, down the lane as fast as I could, back to the Civic, gunned the Civic.

  Nobody saw me.

  Home in time, no messages.

  Lucky me. I never told him about it.

  Look, I needed the job. I worked on him all summer about it.

  “Who do you think would hire you?” he said. “To do what?” And, “What do you want a job for? Is it the money? Is there anything you need that I haven’t gotten you?”

  “No,” I answered. “But I’ve got to have something to do. Come on, Robert, I’ll beg you if you want me to. When you don’t need me, I feel like I’m turning into, I don’t know, some kind of vegetable.”

  “Some vegetable,” he said. He taunted me about it. I should take up gardening, he said, or maybe quilting. Develop new talents. But it must have given him an idea, because one day in September—I’d taken to buying the local papers, circling possibilities in the want ads—he said, “Why don’t you try this one?”

  I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was joking. Then I was so excited, I hugged him. It was a miracle from heaven. I actually hugged him.

  The ad, though, called for references, and of course there wasn’t anybody in my past who knew me as Harriet Major. The name was his, as was the reference list he gave me, which I copied over in my own writing before I went for the interview. I shouldn’t worry, he said with a sardonic smile. It was his small contribution to my joining the work force.

  He questioned me about the Coffeys, right from the start. When he let me move in with them, did I really think that was out of the goodness of his heart? But it was only when the business with Larry began that I knew that the job he’d approved—Georgia Coffey’s ad—was no accident, and by then it was too late.

  Come come, my bitch, since when are you so prudish?

  I tried—I mean, I didn’t mind flirting with Larry—but I couldn’t really bring myself to do it. Instead, I embroidered the story for him. What I did to Larry; what Larry did to me. When I told him I wasn’t coming with Larry, he made suggestions. It turned him on, the whole problem of getting me to enjoy it with Larry, and some of the time I even thought that was it, the turn-on of it, because otherwise what did he want with a Wall Street guy who was starting his own business?

  Until the last weekend.

  Georgia was hysterical. She was overdue, and she’d just learned, that day, that she was going to have to have a C-section. Everything was a rush, the operation was scheduled for Monday morning, and how could I walk out on her like that? How did I expect her to take care of Justin in addition to everything else?

  In fact I pleaded with him, over the phone. It did no good. I got him to let me stay over Friday night, but Saturday I had to go. Georgia screamed at me. I swore to her that I’d be back as early on Sunday as I could, but I went.

  I was a wreck by the time I got to the house. He was waiting for me. He told me to take my clothes off the minute I walked in the door, no shower, nothing. I did, but suddenly I felt inside that I couldn’t go on. I guess it had been building up. I felt like a fly in the spider web, all tangled in my own lies.

  He wouldn’t even give me time to pour myself a drink.

  “I want to talk about our friend, Mr. Coffey,” he said.

  “What about him?”

  “As much as you may have enjoyed it, there’s another reason why you’ve been sleeping with him.”

  “What reason? What are you talking about?”

  There must have been more to the conversation than that, but not a lot. Still, something I said, or the way I said it, or, God knows, the look in my eyes, made him turn suspicious, and he broke off what he was saying.

  Instead he started questioning me about Larry. When was the last time I’d slept with him, where was Georgia, what did Larry say, and so on. I didn’t last very long. In the end, I admitted that I’d never once slept with him, that I’d been lying about it the whole time.

  “Oh?” he said. “You’ve been lying to me? Now, why would you have done a thing like that?”

  “Because I couldn’t,” I answered.

  “Couldn’t what?”

  I started to stammer. “Couldn’t. Couldn’t do it, Robert,” I got out. “Don’t you understand? Couldn’t do it to Justin. To Georgia. Couldn’t do it to myself.”

  “Couldn’t do what?”

  “Couldn’t wreck everything.”

  He kept his eyes on me for a long minute.

  “You’ve never listened to me,” I went on. “How much it’s changed me. They treat me like
a normal person.”

  He said nothing, no expression. I was used to that. Then he smiled. Then laughed dryly.

  “A consummate performance, Becca,” he said. “Highly resourceful. Leave it to my bitch to find a new way to tease me.”

  “It’s not a joke,” I said. Somehow, this time, I wasn’t going to back down. “It’s the truth.” Then, when he still didn’t react, I stumbled on. “Anyway, it’s over between us. I’m going to leave you now.”

  I didn’t plan to say that. It even shocked me to hear it come out. But I thought: however he punishes me now, whatever happens, it’s going to be over.

  He was very calm at first. Extreme, icy calm.

  “Since you’ve disobeyed me,” he said, “of course you’re going to have to be punished. Why don’t you go get ready?”

  I poured myself a drink first. Then I went into the bedroom and lay down on my back and waited. Soon enough, I thought, he’d follow me in. I spread-eagled myself to save him the trouble and waited for him to tie me down. If anything I felt tired—tired of him, I guess. Very tired. I couldn’t even think about what was about to happen. I don’t think I much cared.

  It seemed a long time. Then he came in. I expected him to go to the closet for his equipment. Instead, he sat on the edge of the bed, near me.

  “Tell me, dear Becca,” he said, taking the glass out of my hand and putting it on the night table, “what do you think is the worst thing I could do to you?”

  I laughed a little. I felt beyond his mind games. I think I told him I’d rather leave that up to him.

  “Really?” he said, his eyebrows raised.

  “You’re better at it than I am,” I said.

  He seemed to be considering that for a moment. Then:

  “In addition to having disobeyed me, you’re telling me now that it’s over? That you’re leaving me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that mean you feel nothing for me? After all this time? No love? No hate?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, what do you feel?”

  For once, I wasn’t going to let myself be baited.

  “I’m just very tired,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Poor Becca. But what are you going to do after I’ve finished with you? Go back to the Coffeys?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you just do whatever it is you’re going to do?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Good idea.”

  At this he leaned forward—toward me, I thought. I flinched a little, in spite of myself. But no, he reached instead for the telephone on the night table.

  Somehow I got scared.

  “Who are you calling?” I asked.

  “I thought I’d better call your mother,” he said blandly, the receiver in his hand. “I thought I’d better tell her to come get you.”

  I guess I went a little crazy. I remember lunging at him, struggling, trying to grab the phone out of his hand, and him holding it away, shaking his head. “No, no,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you really leave me no choice. After all, I’m the one who’s now responsible for you, I took you away from that place, and if it’s over between us, somebody’s going to have to take charge of you. You can’t function on your own, you know that. And who else is there?” I clawed at the phone, clawed at him. I was shouting, crazed. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t, I kept shouting at him, and, in my mind: “Once she’s finished with me, she’ll only send me back! I’m not going back there!” I guess I shrieked that at him too, because I remember him saying, “You’re right, that’s what she would do. But wouldn’t that be better than me?” And how it was too bad but I really couldn’t be left on my own, anyone would see that, didn’t I agree, so that he had to call her, who else was there now that I’d rejected him, and how since everything in the house was really his, he’d of course have to take my belongings with him, I’d greet her naked at the door when she came for me, her own twenty-one-year-old daughter, depraved as ever, but what she could or would do with me could hardly be worse than all the things he’d done, could it, and having already survived once at the institute, what made me think I couldn’t again?

  On and on, the phone raised in his hand, but whatever he said, my own imagination jumped past. Evil promiscuous fat little pig bitch, slamming me with whatever she could put her hands on, trembling with the pleasure of revenge, back into the closet with me, oh God, and before I knew it I’d wake up in nirvana city where the drugs knocked my brain cockeyed while the shrinks whispered in my ear about taking responsibility for my own acts and the seriously weirdo sickies, men and women with their mouths ajar, harmless it turned out, but looking like they wanted to tear me to shreds …

  Guess what? I begged. On my knees, I clutched at his pants in my panic. He couldn’t. Please, anything, but he couldn’t. Anything else. I offered to suck him, lick out his anus clean, any of the special things I did for him, anything he wanted, everything. I begged him to kill me first, anything, but not that, please, oh God …

  He slapped me just once, very hard, across the cheek. I was on my knees on the bedroom carpet, clutching at him, and he had the phone raised high, and with his other hand he slapped me.

  I deserved it. I was very hysterical.

  “Look at me, Becca,” he commanded.

  I looked up at him, through my tears, and he seized me under the chin, forcing my head back.

  “You will never, ever, do anything like this again.”

  “I promise. I … I won’t.”

  “Swear it.”

  “I swear it.”

  “You will do exactly what you are told to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “You know now what’s in store for you if you ever lie to me again.”

  “Yes. I swear it.”

  He put the phone down.

  But his pale complexion had turned swarthy, and his own hands, I realized, were now shaking. He tore at his clothes—he’d never stripped in front of me before—and then he took me. No condom. I didn’t care. He grew huge in me. He kept telling me he loved me, how much he loved me, loved me, loved me. I didn’t care. I was too done in to respond. I had no response.

  On Sunday, he let me go.

  Then, sometime the next week—if I’d had any doubts it was Larry he was after—he started in on Justin.

  Someday, when I write the story of my life, I’m going to tell what it’s really like to feel afraid all the time.

  I’ve become an expert.

  That, and running away.

  But something funny happened to me that next week. Maybe it was that I was back in the house, the safety of the house, with Justin. On the one hand, I kept reassuring Robert over the phone that I had every intention of delivering Justin to him, and I kept telling myself the same thing. He’d won. He owned me now as he never had before, and yes, I would bring Justin to him before Georgia got home, and I’d stay there with Justin until Robert was finished with him, and then he could do whatever he wanted with me.

  I’d learned my lesson; I understood; he didn’t have to worry about me.

  I believed it too. At the same time, though, I stalled, invented excuses. Every time I had the opportunity—and we were alone a lot that week—I’d look at Justin and I’d say: I’m going to do it, yes, but not today.

  Then there was the mess with Larry. Trouble, too, with Georgia. Larry must have told her something, I could hear it in her voice. Everything was coming to an end.

  And then suddenly it was Saturday. Friday, he said, “Today’s the day, dear Becca.” He knew Georgia was due home the next morning, that Larry was going to get her at the hospital first thing. “I can’t wait anymore. If he’s not here by tonight, I’ll have to come get him myself. Please don’t make me do that. You know what the consequences will be for you.”

  That night, after Larry came home, I thought I saw his Jaguar parked on the road outside.

  The warlock in winter.

  I lay awake that whole night, too afraid to fall asleep. I guess I knew by
then that I wasn’t going through with it.

  Welcome to the real world, Danny Dalton.

  Alone in the motel on New Year’s Eve, hugging my knees, I’m crooning softly.

  Blues, torch songs, one of Johnny’s songs. Hoagy Carmichael, I think. I don’t remember who Hoagy Carmichael was exactly, but Johnny was hooked on songs of the thirties and forties, films too. He taught me the songs. He played the piano, I sang. We made love to the songs. He thought I could make a career, singing, once we got out of college. I had black in my voice, he said, black soul, even though I was as white as snow.

  Oh God.

  I was going to transfer to the university my sophomore year. We were going to live together off-campus, the top floor of a house.

  But the Witch had other ideas.

  So, I guess, did Johnny One-Note.

  And there were other complications, including Uncle Mark.

  Look, after all that happened, I probably deserved to be committed. But so did she.

  Danny just stirred.

  I bend over him, in semidarkness. He’s still asleep, his eyes closed, but his body is restless, fidgety. I know the signs.

  He’s talking in his sleep, sounds more than words. Then the sounds give way to a kind of anxious, stammering whimper.

  I lean close to him, try to shush him.

  Then: “Mom-mee? Mom-mee?”

  The cry knifes through me. His night cry. No matter how long he and I are together, no matter what, the one he’ll cry for in his sleep will still be Georgia.

  I cuddle him in the darkness, try to quiet him.

  It doesn’t work. He wails, now he’s sobbing, pointing crazily.

  “What do you want, Danny?” I ask him anxiously, clasping him to me. “Oh God, sweetie, it’s just me, Becca. What do you want?”

  His eyes are open, inches from mine.

  “Jutesy,” he manages, hiccuping.

  I find him a box of juice without turning the lights on, spill some of it puncturing the hole with a straw, then hold him propped up while he drinks. He takes only a few sips before falling back onto the bed. He reaches for me. I pull him into me, his head into my breasts, and his little hand reaches up for my hair.