Attachment

by Isabel Fonseca

  Of course she was afraid, with good reason. Because along with mortification there had been the shock of pleasure. Even now, with everything else this aching afternoon, she felt a clear and luminous happiness, as if she’d just swum in the ocean and walked out into the hot sunshine.

  The phone rang twice while she was in the bath. It had to be Mark, with news of a delay. In a thin cotton nightgown and her white robe, she padded down the jute-covered steps, calm, resigned, ready for whatever came next.

  Message one. 11:10 ay-em! Victoria. She was going to sleep off the party, catch the evening train, and get back around midnight. “Don’t worry, Mum, we’ll be in a big gang.”

  Message two. 11:25 ay-em! “Darling pup, how is it that I absolutely never find you in? Listen, ghastly news, I’m afraid, divine retribution for all the remarks about my evil German hosts and woe betide me, sweetheart! The weather is seriously awful, a lead blanket of summer fog—quite common apparently, and one more reason to love Germany. But there’s no flying out of here, not for love or euros. Believe me, they’ve been trying. The entire fleet is powered by their engines, and they only own the fucking airport, but no joy! I’ll ring you later when I know more, but seems I’m grounded. Supposed to blow over by the morning, and with luck the first flight goes out of Munich into Heathrow, let’s see, gaining an hour—what, around oneish? Anyway, the contract looks secure. I should bloody well hope so. Bye, darling. Love to the Viclet. I’ll ring again later. Bye.”

  She felt lower than ever as she played the message again. Darling pup. Two decades of canine endearments, Jean always pup or a variation of: puplet, puppling, the pupster, she supposed for her impulsiveness, her laughable early eagerness. Mark upheld the other end: floppy, shaggy, flop, and shaggers, for his hair, but also his general aspect of sniffing old dog, head out on his long neck—way out in front of his long body, doleful, worried. Oh God, what had she done. And above all, was it fixable? The toaster sprang loudly and the toast jumped, like Jean whenever the doorbell rang.

  Hot buttered toast: this is goodness, Jean thought, making for the stairs. In fact this is ecstasy, seeing as we’re on the subject—hot buttered toast in bed, the main event to which anything else in bed was so much overwrought foreplay. Yet it was always forbidden, as if the annoyance of a few crumbs could compare with such pure and simple gratification. Mark used to bring it up on the tea tray, plus the mail—post and toast. When had he stopped doing that? About twenty-two years ago.

  She reached her room too tired to feel more than grateful to be alive and alone in her own bed and, quick glance at the clock (12:12), she fell asleep immediately.

  Jean awoke feeling that nothing could upset her, not even these sleep lines: carved so deep she looked in the mirror and saw a St. Jacques woodcut. She was splashing her face when the phone rang. It had to be Mark. She lunged, belly-flopping across to her side of the bed.

  “Well, hello you! You’re sounding chipper.” It was Dan. “Listen, do you think I could stop by? I’m in the neighborhood.”

  Jean sat rigidly erect, as if yanked upright by an invisible rope at the top of her head. He must know that Mark’s flight had been delayed—shit, he was coming back for more. What should she say? “No” seemed not only rude but dangerous when the man had an entire digital archive. She glanced at her watch: 4 o’clock. “Um,” she began, tiptoeing across the room and looking down through the window to see if he was standing outside.

  “Just for a minute,” he said. “I have something for you.”

  “Well, I was just about to have some tea,” she said. “Do you want to stop by for a couple of minutes?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  She pulled on a pair of Levi’s, added a belt to feel more dressed, the tooled Western one with the worn silver buckle, and gave her hair a good brush. Perhaps to shut out any kind of reconsideration, Jean sang as she headed down the stairs barefoot—the theme from Rawhide. “Keep movin’, movin’, movin’—though they’re disapprovin’…” She didn’t make it to the kitchen before the bell got her out of her skin, so she opened the door almost as soon as he buzzed, giving him a little fright of his own.

  “What a nice welcome.”

  He grinned as he handed her a bunch of pale pink peonies. In his other hand he carried a punnet of ripe strawberries. Dan looked perfectly worn in, like his leather jacket. Jean noted this almost clinically and realized that she was seriously overrelaxed; but she could feel herself tensing down to her bare toes.

  “Dan,” she said, a touch matronly, as full acknowledgment of the fruit and flowers, wondering if he’d heard her singing. “I have to call New York, but come in for a minute. I’ll make some tea. Or maybe strong coffee.” She held out a hand for the leather jacket he was unpeeling. As she tossed it over the sofa in the front living room, she caught a whiff of his scent—leather and laundry and what else?

  “Coffee’s perfect. I never did get that kip.”

  “Moving in?” she said, aiming for cheerful, eyeing his bulky gym bag and wondering how she was going to get him out of here. He smiled but didn’t reply as he followed her down to the kitchen, the bag over his shoulder.

  She put the peonies into the blue-and-white Spanish pitcher and took the berries, tipping them into the green bowl. He set his bag on the counter and opened it up and began to unpack his laptop—what was this? Jean did not want any more computer screen; she should say so.

  “Listen, I have to call my father—family crisis.”

  “I just thought you might want to have a quick last look, be sure there isn’t one you want a print of before we delete them for good.”

  Such vanity! He said he’d brought something for her—was this it? The chance to order a print? And did he imagine she understood nothing about copies, as if by pressing the delete button with her very own finger it would be real to her as well as ceremonial, like cutting a red ribbon?

  Dan took in her doubtful look, which was the best she could manage. A flash of anger crossed his tired face. “Look. I made them for you. For your pleasure. I don’t wank to pictures, you know. I don’t have to. What do I want them for? So I can blackmail your husband into giving me a pay rise—radically overdue, I might add. You have to trust me, Jean. I think you can do that. You trusted me last night.”

  So, on day two, Dan was going to dispense with charm. Jean’s head ached; her hangover seemed to swell with the renewed tension. Definite mistake, letting him come over, though of course she knew it was by then a mistake well advanced, a mistake with plenty of momentum. She looked at the clock: nearly noon in New York.

  “Just give me five minutes.” He ran a slide show of the pictures with a portentous sound track: Albinoni in Venice. She wanted to scream—Dan thinks he’s an artist. He paused on an image of her long curved spine. “Baby pinecones under snow,” he said, pointing to the light track of her vertebrae.

  How could she explain to this egomaniac that she didn’t want baby pinecones, or poetry of any kind? He was so childish, waiting for praise. But she sensed his volatility. She couldn’t just throw him out. She crossed her arms, settling on a kitchen stool, and turned away from the screen. The strawberries in that bowl, she thought, they’re perfectly complementary, the red and the green. And as he no doubt intended, she remembered his ready handkerchief in the cinema, his courtly gesture as well as his unexpected reference to Desdemona. And then it occurred to her that he’d never read Othello. He’d seen the ad with the strawberry-patterned handkerchief, an ad for a perfume called Jalousie—she’d just seen it herself, at the airport.

  “Do you mind talking a minute about Shirley,” Jean said, thinking she’d still get on top of this. “Tell me if you mind.”

  “Fire away,” he said, but stopped the slide show. He looked straight at her, as if open-faced meant open-minded, sitting down on the stool beside her.

  “Do you really not see the imbalance in your relationship?” she started, unnerved by his candidly unrepentant gaze. “She’s not free. You’re her
boss.” And now something strange happened. She looked for that part of herself—the part that disapproved—and it wasn’t there. “Like students and teachers,” she went on tinnily. “Like hookers and their clients. You pay her. Don’t kid yourself about consenting adults. It’s not a level field.”

  “Actually, we hardly pay our interns anything at all. Hubbard’s orders. Does that help?”

  Jean smiled but said, “No, actually it doesn’t. It’s the balance of power and you know what I mean.” But she didn’t know what she meant either, not anymore.

  “Well, the balance of power is always a story in these things, isn’t it, how it changes. Keeps us all interested, right? Shirley has her power. And so do you. On the page and elsewhere.”

  Dan ate a handful of strawberries. Then, looking around for something more satisfying, reached for a banana and ate that, and then a hunk ripped from a baguette. “I’m famished. Do you mind?” he asked, his methodical circular grinding like the vortex of a waste disposal. Jean shook her head and just waited, sensing he was midsentence as well as midbite. He was still swallowing when he spoke.

  “Why can you not accept that Shirley likes it? Surely you’re not going to be offended by bad taste. I mean, are we communicating? You will rush to tell me about the love deficit in her childhood, but I will tell you that this is a girl who’s got to have something in her mouth at all times. And where’s the harm in that? Makes the world go round. Surely you’re not totally mystified, Mrs. H.” His tongue was gliding across his teeth, a prominent bulge moving under his lip. She blushed and continued to blush. But she battled on.

  “It’s not the same between you and me. I mean, I’m older than you. You work for my husband. I make my own living. Sure, you’re freer. In every way. But I’m richer.” And smarter, she thought to herself. “Parity, that’s the thing.” She was not sure she wanted to invite such comparisons—and if she was so smart, what was Dan Manning doing in her kitchen? She shifted the focus. “And all the other interns?”

  “None. Not a one. Or not lately. Believe me, most of them have much more promising boyfriends. Hedge-funders with summer cars… Can you please explain to me, since you are mistress and supreme diviner of the female psyche—not to mention the male psyche, though no extra points for that—why a convertible is the undying aphrodisiac for women?”

  “Actually, women hate convertibles. They fuck up their hair.” But he wasn’t even listening.

  “Now, let me see, interns… Apart from Shirley, we have Sareen, who sadly is married, and Leslie. Who’s a bloke, I think.”

  “So not resisting on principle, then.”

  “My principle is one of happiness, if that can be a principle. And regular health checks. Yes, making people happy, including, occasionally, old Bert here. Bert?” he said loudly, talking to his bunched crotch. “You’re good people! Actually, until recently even I had a real girlfriend. As you will have gathered.” He sighed at her memory.

  “So what happened to her anyway?” While she thought: What happened to me? Why did he think she gathered anything about his love life, apart from the segment that featured herself? She had to get him out of here.

  “Thought you’d never ask. She moved back to Brazil. We had a laugh, you know? But in the end she didn’t really travel, if you get what I mean. From a poor village near Ouro Preto. You can take the girl out of the village…but you, you’re a mystery. Innocent, truly. Yet so wonderfully playful, so daring—a very compelling combination, if I may say so.”

  Had she been so daring? She could feel her throat coloring and looked at the clock: time’s up. She rose, hoping he’d get the point. And he stood up, too.

  “This is what you saw them on?” he said, inspecting Mark’s digital camera, and shaking his head. “Pitiful.” He switched it on to see where she’d gotten to. “I see you made it to dessert. Did you realize this is a little film?”

  She did not.

  “Perhaps you’d like to see it, before I show you the flawless masterpiece I spent the morning editing.”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh, come on. It doesn’t last a minute.” He laughed, turning to the computer, searching through his files. “It’s embarrassingly quick. Let’s see what you think.”

  Dan looked at the screen, unmoved, as if he was showing his staff a mock-up for an ad when what they had before them, with full sound, was Shirley noisily sucking his cock. At least she assumed it was Dan’s. Jean was appalled, and impressed—the steady application, the forthright energy, made her think, ridiculously, of the refrain from that old book of Vic’s, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt: We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it! Yes, she’d done this, and in the course of her researches she’d seen it being done. But never before had she watched something like this with someone else, let alone someone she’d done God knows what with the night before. Was that how she looked, like a dope-eyed farm animal bobbing before the farmer? Every now and again there was a fist in the frame, Dan holding the girl’s hair, controlling the rhythm—but this was not remotely how she pictured herself: as something ethereal and elegant and goddessy.

  Yes, that was Dan. And this, she thought, was Jean: watching pornography with Dan, watching pornography with Dan in it with Dan…she could even feel a twinge of mechanical lust. But what kind of man would show a woman such a scene, so utterly confident of her appreciation? This was going to be much harder than she anticipated, managing the new Dan—hideously entitled.

  “Same thing for lunch every single day,” he said, shaking his head again. “And unlike your own, this is a conscience not bothered. Healthy girl. What Shirley worries about is the calorie content of all that jizz. Hey, you’re the health writer.” He looked over at her companionably. “Is it true that one load of spunk’s got twice as many calories as an ice-cream sundae?”

  Jean looked at him—was he expecting her to smile fondly? Surely this wasn’t a question that demanded an answer.

  “And she’s been skipping lunch for weeks. Only problem with that is I have to skip lunch every day too, hence the sleek form you have before you.”

  How could she get him out of here? Why did she feel so dazed, inert? She couldn’t look at anything but the screen—she certainly couldn’t look at him, and wished he wouldn’t stand so menacingly close. He leaned against the counter and their arms touched; she leaned forward so they didn’t. The clip finally ended—with much gagging and choking and blurring, moaning becoming a roar as the hand holding the camera jerked and the screen went black.

  “But wait. I have something much better for you.” Before she could protest, he clicked onto a different file.

  She could hardly breathe, fearing the worst, and then there it was—the prime of Mrs. Jean Hubbard, not photographs this time, but a sepia-tinted film, accompanied by a strange sound track tapping on her headache; she thought she could detect the sound of a dripping faucet, then something like a box of nails being repeatedly scattered over a hard surface… Well, she hadn’t been far wrong: here was goddessy Jean, ethereal and elegant Jean—a gracefully suffering sea nymph in a painful portrait of submission and release.

  Of course Dan had to film it: How else would it properly become pornography? How else would it even exist? How would he? Despite her miserably violated feeling, she knew that she could connect again to the person in these images, right here and now, and she absolutely had to get him out of here. She stepped away, and he stepped toward her. Again that chokingly woody, underground scent, and she gasped for air. Help—Jean thought, and she pleaded in a thin whisper, gripping the counter behind her, “Go!” He raised his hands toward her. Louder, in an ugly rasping voice she’d never heard before, her fists by her sides, she said, “Didn’t you hear me? I said GO—get out!”

  “Not that way,” he said quietly. Unsmiling and jaw clenched (very porno, Jean registered), Dan pulled her close with both hands and she slumped against his chest, freely inhaling. There was no humoring him to wipe tho
se pictures. He was going to make her beg and she was ready to do it. “I came here because I wanted to give something back to you,” he told her solemnly. “Something you own as much as I do, something we created. But you shouldn’t have stolen my memory card.”

  He grabbed her hand and pressed it against his gut, just above the belt—waiting, she guessed, for her to move her hand voluntarily; he thought she couldn’t resist. She could see all this, so why did she feel herself weakening as if drugged? That’s just it: Dan was a drug—one you snort. Sensation, she told herself, that’s all this was, all they could possibly be feeling—not even pleasure, just sensation. And power—his. She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply. Then he squeezed her hand, painful where her ring was, making her open her eyes and pay attention.

  “I suppose I should punish you—not, as you think and fear, with the pictures, and not as you want me to do right now.”

  As she wanted? Jean was infuriated, all the more so because it was true. Something they’d created: she hadn’t thought of it that way—she’d just been going along with anything and everything on this weird weekend of suspended time. She’d thought she’d smooth things over, that they had a deal. And now she was out of her depth. He was pressing in on her and she couldn’t speak.

  He kissed her around the ears, forcing her back over the counter, supported by her elbows, her chest pushed up below him, and he whispered, “You’re not going to be drunk this time, or playing a part. And I’m not going to punish you even when you beg me to. I know it makes it easier for you if it hurts, as if it’s not your fault, if you’re overpowered or out of it. You don’t need to be punished, Jean. And your conscience is not my problem.” He turned her around so she was bent over the counter, her back to him, and showed her the delete key. “You go ahead,” he breathed into her hair, grappling with her belt buckle, “and don’t mind me.”