Stay

by Nicola Griffith

  “He dazzled you.”

  “Yes. And I thought I dazzled him, too, especially when the Naples project was done and he said did I want to go back to New York with him and help him in his new project. Did I tell you he’s a psychologist?”

  “No.” Present tense at last. I was beginning to think she’d killed him.

  “He’s a clever son of a bitch. He knows how people work inside, really knows. That’s how he got me.” That bitterness again. “Geordie earns seven figures a year telling Nordstrom and Tiffany’s and the Gap how wide to make the aisles, where to site their stores, what product should be where in relation to the door, so that consumers spend more. It’s a science. He’s got all these charts and graphs and programs—can quote numbers like a TV guy doing sports stats. The time per visit that the average American spends in a shopping mall is fifty-nine minutes, he says to his customers, down from sixty-six in 1996 and seventy-two in 1992. Then he tells them how he can make each minute worth more to them, how to maximize each square foot of retail space.”

  “And can he?”

  “Oh yeah. Like I said, he’s good. The best. I learned a lot from him: the downshift period, the decompression zone, the invariant right. Think about a street in New York, people walking fast to get someplace. When you walk fast, your peripheral vision narrows, so you don’t pick up visual cues well, and it takes you a while to slow down if something catches your interest—depending on how fast you’re going, you need up to twenty-five feet. So the best place to be is next to a store with a cool window display, because by the time the shopper begins to slow to shopping speed, he’s outside your place, and the things in your window will really catch his eye, and he’s more likely to come inside. So then he goes inside, but he’s still in street mode for the first ten or fifteen steps, so it’s useless putting anything near the door because he just won’t see it. That space is where the potential shopper decompresses. Once he’s begun to do that, he always—invariably, Geordie says—turns to the right. Why? Who cares, he just does. So that’s where you put the stuff you want him to notice: twelve paces in and to the right. You do that and sales go up more than thirty percent. It’s like a guarantee. And that’s just getting them inside. Geordie told me that after one retailer talked to him and redesigned their stores, gross sales climbed sixty-one percent. Since then, his contracts always include a bonus clause.”

  “So you learned a lot. Was this in Naples?” Beneath the burning logs the coals were beginning to glow, and I was hungry.

  “Some. We were there—I was there—six weeks; he’d been there a few weeks before me. Then we went to New York.”

  “And you stayed in his loft in SoHo.”

  She wrapped her arms around her and nodded. I waited. Her gaze stayed internal.

  “How about another beer?”

  She nodded again. I brought two back, put one on the grass beside her, and settled down again. “So, you moved to SoHo.”

  In what seemed like an irrelevant aside, she asked, “Did you know that half the grocery stores in the country have these tiny cameras inside their frozen food cases, or even inside cans of peas sitting on a high shelf? It’s illegal to have video surveillance of changing rooms, but they’re wired for audio. Half the mirrors in a department store have cameras behind them—and hundreds on the ceilings. Geordie’s apartment was like that, except I didn’t find out until later.”

  Cameras. I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Man, I loved that loft: so urban and cool. Those halogen lights, high ceiling, bare beams, antiques in the bedroom. An elevator right from the street! And Geordie took me with him to his first job on Fifth Avenue, told everyone I was his associate, even consulted me on where to set up our cameras—though even then I knew it was more his way of teaching me than real consultation. Jesus, the things I learned. Unbelievable. And it was all real.”

  “But other things weren’t.” I didn’t like the idea that I might be on tape.

  “No. Only Geordie kept my mind on other things so it was hard to tell. He flattered me, he treated me like a peer. He was kind. He … the sex was great, exciting—he was generous there, too. It was great, everything was perfect.” She had begun to circle; we were coming to it. “He talked a lot. Sometimes it was hard to tell when he was joking. He talked about all his cameras and his charts and statistics and how he could train anyone to be his slave if he wanted. As long as they were young enough when he started. A woman my age was too old to train, he said, it would be easier to break me than train me. But he talked as well about training shoppers so they were like lemmings, and he’d laugh—I would, too—and it would be a joke, so I thought it was all a joke. Life was one huge joke, a big party, and I was the guest of honor, and I deserved it.”

  “But then something happened.”

  “Yes. He … the first time, it …” She took a swallow of beer, then a deep breath. “We were having sex. I was on top. He suddenly said, Stop, and his voice was all cold, so I stopped, and he pushed me off and got off the bed, and I thought maybe he was ill—was going to the bathroom or something—but then he suddenly grabbed me from behind, shoved me on my face, and got on top of me, and I could feel that he wanted me up my ass, so I said, No, stop, wait, let’s get some lube, but he just … he didn’t, he wouldn’t, he just fucked me anyway, and it hurt, and I yelled, but he kept on and on until he came, and then he laughed and climbed off.”

  “Why didn’t you hit him?”

  “Hit him?” She looked as though she had no idea what I was talking about.

  We stared at each other: the alien across the fire.

  “Anyhow, I cried. And when he saw I was crying, he smiled, but then his face fell and he said, Sorry, sorry, oh god, sorry, I forgot, and the change was so quick I thought maybe I’d imagined it, especially when he started crying, too. He stroked my hair, he just kept saying sorry. Then he brought me some tissues, and he held me, and he said that his last girlfriend—he’d talked about her before, they’d been together about a year—had liked that, liked being fucked up the ass and taken by force, pretending to say no, and he’d just been confused. And then he ran me a bath, and washed me—he was sweet—and said sorry again, and made me cocoa. And the next day he took me out for a great dinner at Le Cirque, and gave me a diamond bracelet.”

  The clearing was silent but for the hiss and pop of the fire. “And the second time, what did he give you for that?”

  “Stock. But that makes it sound so easy, so simple. It wasn’t.”

  I waited, but she didn’t seem to want to say any more. I drank some beer, savored its bite. “Did you know,” I said, “that fizz isn’t just the feeling of bubbles of carbon dioxide bursting on your tongue, it’s mostly a chemical reaction detected by your taste buds?”

  She took a sip. “It feels like bubbles.”

  We both silently contemplated the enzymatic breakdown of carbon dioxide to carbonic acid. After a while, I sighed. “Finish the story, Tammy. You may as well just get it all out.”

  After a long moment she bowed her head, and began again.

  The second time, she said, was not until after she had finally come to believe that she had been wrong about that cruel smile, that it had just been a mistake, a slip akin to crying out an ex-lover’s name just as your muscles begin to squeeze and shudder. Geordie was letting her analyze his data on the shopping traffic at the boutique he was consulting for, and was paying her well for it. Their sex was good, and everything else, especially for a southern girl who had spent most of her adult life in Atlanta. They went to MoMA, and off-Broadway plays, to a New York premiere of some film directed by a colleague’s brother. She’d been out to lunch at one of the galleries, then bought a few things at Saks, then come back to the loft to find Geordie on the phone. She’d put her shopping down near the elevator door, tiptoed up behind him, and kissed him on the back of the neck. He turned and punched her in the stomach.

  “He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t change expression, he didn’t even check to
see where I’d landed, just kept talking. Didn’t miss a beat. I lay half on and half off the rug, thinking, Oh, I have a run in my hose, and trying to figure out why I couldn’t get my breath, and he just kept talking. And when he put the phone down, he smiled and said, Hi honey, what are you doing down there? It was so … so confusing, and he seemed so concerned, that I couldn’t put it together. His reality and mine.”

  When she’d got her breath back, she told him he’d hit her—but she was hesitant about it—and he said, Oh, I must have caught you in the stomach with my elbow—you should never sneak up on me that way, honey—I’m really sorry I hurt you. And a portfolio of biotech stock appeared in her name the next day. She was bewildered: was it possible he really believed he hadn’t punched her? Had he? Was she mistaken?

  He started to talk about her joining him in business partnership in a few months, about her bringing her things from Atlanta. Their sex became more adventurous; lots of fantasy role-play. Their schedule—all in the analysis stage, now, and done in the loft—was hectic, and sometimes they didn’t sleep for thirty hours at a time, and even when they did sleep it was at odd times of the day; their meals were ordered in, and erratic.

  “I didn’t know, sometimes, what time of day or night it was, or even what day of the week. There’s no windows in that place, except the bedroom, and he’s got those covered in this slippery gray plastic stuff. The outside world started to feel weird. My watch had disappeared that first week, so I only ever knew what time it was when I asked Geordie, and sometimes what he told me didn’t make any sense. What?”

  “Nothing.” I understood, now, what had been so odd about that loft: no clocks. Even the VCR and microwave displays read 88:88. And there had been no radio tuner on the music system, heavy drapes closed in the daytime bedroom, no phones. “Go on.”

  “It was surreal. He’d sometimes stop in the middle of talking about foot traffic patterns and shopper penetration zones and say … weird stuff, like ‘Women are lesser beings,’ and he sounded so, I don’t know, so earnest and reasonable, that I just … I ended up agreeing with him.”

  That, she said, was when their sex play went from make-believe bondage to using silk scarves, which became rope, and then chains. One time he chained her up and teased her sexually for hours until she was crying out, screaming, begging him to give her an orgasm, and he just goaded her into saying more and more humiliating things, explicit things, until he finally let her come and come again. “And I liked it,” she said, half defiant, half ashamed.

  I kept my expression vaguely concerned.

  “What I didn’t know was that he had the whole thing on tape. He played it for me one day—it could have been morning, it could have been the middle of the night—when we were eating breakfast. Have you ever watched yourself having sex? It’s …” She closed her eyes for a moment. Her head was almost wholly in shadow, black against the stained sky. Uncertain firelight, a softer orange, made the shadows dance and sway, so that her face looked hollowed and old. She opened her eyes. “You don’t look like a person, you look like a thing, a wiggling white thing, dripping with sweat, drooling, face all swollen. The audio makes it worse. I looked at that video and hated myself. And Geordie smiled, and said something like, Imagine if your family and friends got their hands on this! And then he went back to eating his scrambled eggs and asked me to pour him some more tomato juice. And I did.”

  After that, things got worse. He acted as though they were still partners, equals. She didn’t know up from down. He even began to seem sort of fatherly. “That’s when he told me about the girl in Arkansas. He called her his wife-in-training.”

  She played with the cheap watch we’d bought in New Jersey, the one she never took off. My bottle was empty, hers barely touched. It would only delay her, and my dinner, if I asked if I could have it, so I lay down again on the grass and breathed its scent, green and vital and unspoilt. The fire burned cleanly now, bright in the gathering dusk, and the wind in the trees whispered back and forth. The whispering grew, and was suddenly shot through with myriad tweets and twitters. I sat up.

  “Oh,” Tammy said, as a thousand red-breasted grosbeaks settled like feathery locusts in the trees surrounding the clearing. The air shivered with their flutter and preen, and their calls sounded like the metallic squeaks of a thousand rusty water pump handles. After a while the noise died to an occasional squeak or flutter as they settled for the night.

  “Where did they come from?”

  “The north. They’re migrating. Tomorrow they’ll be on their way again, after they eat all the high-lipid berries and unwary insects in sight.” Asset strippers. But she wasn’t interested in the birds, just in avoiding talking. “So,” I said.

  She pretended to be busy watching the trees.

  “You were talking about his wife-in-training. That’s an odd phrase.”

  She muttered something.

  “What?”

  “I said, he meant it literally. Her name is Luz. She’s nine years old.”

  I knew I didn’t want to hear this.

  “He bought her in Mexico City two years ago. She was seven. Her mother was a prostitute, and her brother and sister. Or maybe they were dead. Geordie said she’d still be on the street if he hadn’t … if he hadn’t rescued her. He said they flock like birds, the kids there. Gangs of them, running around wild on the streets. He adopted her but she’s being fostered by someone else. That was the hardest part, he said, finding just the right family. He seemed so proud of it, the way people talk about the dream house they’re having built. You know: they tell you when they first got the idea for something, what sparked it, even where they were; they go on and on about how they picked the architect and the builder, how they found the land and beat all the obstacles, the building permits, getting the utilities connected, what they did when they found out that what they’d figured was bedrock wasn’t. Jesus, I hate people like that. Anyhow, he found a couple in the Bible Belt, an hour’s drive from Little Rock, and he paid them a lot of money—a lot in their terms, he said—to school her at home in traditional values, to teach her to cook and sew and obey her future husband, to keep her away from the influence of TV and video and the web, even books. She had enough English now, he said, to read from the Bible. He pays the couple to keep their mouths shut. She’s nine now. Very pretty, very sweet, he said; he’s been to see her twice. Real healthy, and smart. When she gets to be fourteen—a well-trained, brainwashed fourteen—he’ll take her to Georgia or someplace and marry her. And she’ll belong to him totally. She’s already trained to think he can do what he wants with her, he said. If she even squeaks, all he has to do is divorce her and she’ll be kicked back to Mexico, still a teenager. No family, no money, no job, nothing. She’d probably be dead in a few years. And you know what? It’s true, pretty much. He can do all that. It’s legal. He liked telling me that part. He didn’t apply for citizenship, and because she’s a minor she wouldn’t even really be a legal resident. If he divorced her at fifteen, she’d be shipped off and no one would care.”

  No one cared now.

  I stared up and back at the trees behind me. Here was a smart, good-looking woman who had grown up in the last quarter of the twentieth century, yet she had been reduced to nothing more than a shell in just three months. She had allowed herself to be raped, and beaten, and humiliated. She had let him convince her she was crazy. Three months. And even after learning what this man was doing to a child, she had stayed. She had had a key, and money, and Dornan, who loved her, and she had stayed. I didn’t understand at all.

  “Why did you leave with me? What made things different? Karp still has that tape.”

  Tammy laughed, and it was one of the saddest sounds I had ever heard. “You have no idea what you’re like, do you? There I was, floating in this loft like … like a goddamn orange bobbing in space, tethered to nothing, no up, no down, no idea how I got there, no air to breathe, no way home, everything so unreal I wondered if I even existed, and you walked
through the door. You’re like concrete. Completely real. Even just standing there, before you said anything, you made everything else real: the walls, the floors, what he’d done to me.”

  Me, real. It was my turn to laugh, but it didn’t sound sad, and now that I’d started I couldn’t seem to stop.

  You’re frightening her, Julia observed.

  “I know,” I said. “Dornan was wrong. I think maybe I’ll go mad after all.”

  Tammy sat back on her heels, and I suddenly saw her as she must have looked when she was thirteen, with new breasts, and the realization that she was never going to be allowed to do things boys did, never just be herself, and I was filled with a horrible, insidious tenderness. She was fighting hard. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have any of the tools.

  “What do you mean about Dornan?” she said.

  “What? Oh. He told me I wouldn’t go mad with grief, that I’m too stubborn.”

  “Grief?”

  I stared at her. How could she not know? “Julia,” I said carefully.

  She took the kind of short breath people do when they remember something they know they shouldn’t have forgotten. But it had been back in May, and I had only been her fiancé’s friend who didn’t like her, and then I’d just disappeared, and so much had happened to her since then that it wasn’t surprising. Except, of course, it was.

  “Don’t.” I held up my hand. “Don’t apologize.”

  She didn’t. She just studied my face for a while, then rocked back on her heels and up onto her feet, and walked into the trailer. She came back with a fresh beer for me.

  I felt tired and sick and didn’t really want it.

  Let the woman apologize. Take the beer, Julia said, and for the first time, I wished she would go away. I tried to call the wish back, but it was too late. She disappeared.