Valley of Ashes

by Cornelia Read

  She’d had three kids in total with her first two husbands, then taken in a pal of ours as a foster child. No alimony, no child support after I’d turned eight, but she’d kept a roof over our heads and food on the table and gotten all four of us into college.

  Dean twitched in his sleep, beside me. Falling through some dream.

  I thought about the first time he’d come to see me in Williamstown. I’d been crashing on Ellis’s dorm room floor since just after Christmas, that year, but it was spring break and she was in LA and the college locked up all the buildings over vacations.

  A barroom pal of ours had paid four weeks’ rent on an unfurnished room in this wretched boardinghouse for old drunk men, across the street from the Women’s Exchange thrift store on the scariest street in the entire Berkshires, but he couldn’t stand it after two nights and offered it up to me.

  I didn’t have a phone, and I was working for a construction crew—sanding Sheetrock all day in these condos on the edge of town. Four bucks an hour.

  Dean called me on the condo’s office phone Friday morning, saying he planned to leave East Syracuse on his Harley around one. We’d figured it would take him four hours to reach me, but there was a blizzard.

  The crew’s boss knew how much I’d been looking forward to Dean’s visit all week, and he felt awful for me, sure there was no way a guy on a motorcycle could make it through that weather in early March.

  So the boss told me he’d buy me a lobster dinner to cheer me up. He was a very sweet older man, avuncular (though he was also the coke wholesaler for half the county, driving in big counts from the Cape every other week).

  I thanked him and said I’d take him up on it if Dean didn’t show, but that I had to go back to my scuzzy room with the single bare bulb hanging from its ceiling just in case my beau managed to slog through.

  So I went back to the boardinghouse and sat on my single mattress on the floor and waited.

  The room was tall, its hideous wallpaper browned and peeling. The only furniture in it was six wire milk crates I’d stolen from Price Chopper to use as a bureau, an old silk-lined leather makeup case with a mirror inside its lid, and the aforementioned mattress.

  No one in their right mind would dare piss in the shared bathroom down the hall, much less look behind its shower stall’s rancid curtain.

  The whole place smelled sharply of mildew, raw bourbon, and the two-weeks-abandoned fried egg shriveling on a tin plate just outside my door, in the communal kitchenette’s sink.

  I’d bought a vanilla-scented Air Wick to combat the stench, and to this day the slightest whiff of that fakey-sweet fragrance makes me break out in a pulp-novel death-row-inmate sweat.

  I spent a lot of time thinking about my prospects as I waited, staring at the bare bulb’s entirely too noose-like shadow on the wall across from me.

  I was twenty-two years old, had left college three credits shy of graduation, and wasn’t welcome in my mother’s boyfriend’s waterfront nine-acre estate on the Gold Coast of Long Island, or the VW camper in which my father had slept for the last thirteen years in the wild brown canyons north of Malibu.

  Other than the mattress and the milk crates, I owned somebody’s father’s discarded tweed overcoat, a shitload of secondhand books, some crappy clothes, a rusting orange 1976 Volkswagen Rabbit, and your basic cheap seat at the lip of the abyss.

  I’d failed at everything, even school, and now I was going to work at minimum-wage jobs forever.

  But Dean did slog through that storm. It took him nine hours. He was soaked through to the skin, shaking from cold, blue-lipped and starting to get feverish.

  I peeled his frigid sodden clothes off, layer by layer: motorcycle boots, quilted Carhartt coveralls, flannel-lined jeans, two insulated plaid work shirts, long underwear, and three pairs of white socks.

  I toweled him off and made him get under the covers of my pallet on the floor, hung his clothes carefully over the spitting radiator, and climbed into bed beside him to twine my legs and arms tight as I could around his trembling body.

  And so that night in Williamstown I also had Dean, to whom I mattered enough that nine hours of fishtailing through snowy, sleeting darkness had proved no obstacle.

  Maybe I’d survived all the crazy and things were going to turn out okay, you know?

  We didn’t have a grand unsettling passion but something even better: A union we both took pride in. The commencement of our actual lives.

  I heard a car drive slowly by out on Mapleton Street. One of the girls cooed down the hall, but settled back into quiet.

  Dean turned over again in his sleep, murmuring something I was terrified to hear. Setsuko’s name? A paean to her loveliness? To her lips around his cock?

  I wanted to kill him—beat him and kick him and break his teeth and his bones and then twist his head around on his neck until I’d finished him, until every last sinew of the man who’d fathered my children was shredded and useless and suitably punished.

  And I wanted to beg his forgiveness for every fault I’d ever had. Promise I could make myself perfect, that I’d never ask for anything again, never need another thing from him.

  I wanted to do anything it took—anything—to keep for my daughters the loving father they deserved. So worth it, sacrificing myself utterly on a maternal-suttee pyre to ensure they’d never have to grow up broken and damaged and bereft and so unbearably goddamn sad… never have to feel the enormity of suffering by which I was being consumed in that moment.

  Never have to become what I was.

  And oh, God, I wanted Dean to save me, still.

  I drew my knees up to my chest and hugged them tight, trying to hold the pieces of myself together—aligned, at least, if not intact.

  45

  I had thirty seconds of grace when I woke up the next morning—the tiniest moment of not-remembering before the golem of pain climbed back on, smashing its full weight into my chest repeatedly while it choked me, laughing its golem-y ass off.

  I was being sodomized by my own life.

  And not the fun kind of sodomy, either.

  I wondered if actually opening my eyes might improve things, so I tried it.

  Rumpled absence where Dean had been, cold to the touch.

  For all I knew he was downstairs on the computer, telling Setsuko what a drag I was, the pair of them plotting out how to ditch me for their next session of hot monkey love.

  Which for some reason engendered in me less anger at my faithless husband than a sudden all-consuming white-hot desire to whack his insipid strumpet as hard as I could full in the simpering, prissy, prettily golden fucking face with the flat of a heavy shovel.

  Repeatedly.

  Afterward I’d make Dean look, gripping his head from behind so he couldn’t shy away.

  “Go ahead,” I’d whisper, tracing his ear’s delicate rim with the tip of my tongue, hot and slick. “Try fucking her now.”

  Hey, a girl can dream.

  And the skanky bitch deserved it.

  Not least for having convinced me to leave her alone in my house, watching over my children.

  I found Dean downstairs in the kitchen. He was just standing backlit at the window, looking out. The girls were still asleep in their cribs.

  I couldn’t step over the threshold, couldn’t muster the will to move another inch forward.

  Maybe I’d fall down, right there in the door frame. Maybe I’d disintegrate, every numb atom of my being whirling away into some welcome void, nothing left but the fistful of salt grains and ashes that had once been my tiny black heart.

  They’d sift slowly to the floor—spirals of glitter and smoke, serendipity tossed from Charon’s decks at departure—making a tiny, negligible pile that was worthless as I had been.

  I choked on that thought, some willful noise trying to fight its way out of my throat.

  Dean turned around and started walking toward me without a word. He took me in his arms, fingers of his left hand snaking up into the l
ocks of hair at the nape of my neck so he could press my cheek to his chest. Tenderly.

  I could hear his heartbeat. Feel it.

  I closed my eyes again and wept, trying with all my strength to keep from making a sound, to keep from betraying myself with the smallest hint of motion, or of breath.

  “Shhhh, Bunny,” he whispered. “Shhhhhhhh.”

  “I don’t know how to do this…, ” I said, “survive it. I can’t. I don’t know what to do and it all just hurts so much. Too much.”

  “You don’t have to know anything,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “You don’t have to do anything. Not a single thing. It’s all right. It’s over. We’re all right.”

  I shook my head, slight range of movement between the broad plain of his hand, the solid shield of his chest. “You don’t—”

  “What?” he asked, lips brushing the top of my head again. The part in my hair.

  “Love me.”

  “Don’t believe that. Don’t think it.”

  “Not—”

  He waited, and when I couldn’t say anything more, asked, “Not what?”

  “Like her,” I said. “Not the way you love her.”

  Dean bent his knees, just a little. “Put your arms around my neck.”

  “No.”

  He lifted them himself, pressing them to curve around his neck one at a time, so gently.

  “Open your legs,” he whispered. “Just a little.”

  I did.

  He cupped his hands under my ass and lifted me, no effort at all.

  “Wrap them around my waist,” he said.

  I did.

  “Tighter,” he said. “Tilt your pelvis up.”

  I shook my head against his neck.

  “Yes,” he said. “I want to feel you.”

  So I did.

  “Cross your ankles behind my back,” he said. “Tight.”

  I did.

  “Like that,” he said. “Just like that.”

  And he carried me just like that across the next two rooms.

  When he reached the sofa, he lowered himself down. Slowly, not letting me go, until my ass was resting on the middle cushion and he was down on his knees before me.

  He bent forward until my back touched the pillows behind me, then he took my arms down from around his neck.

  “You are the most honorable woman I have ever known,” he said.

  I looked up into his eyes.

  “You are my wife. You are the mother of our beautiful daughters.”

  I waited.

  “That means so much to me,” he said. “It means the world.”

  I looked down at our clasped hands.

  “The most courageous woman. The most admirable.”

  I wriggled against him, just a little bit.

  “I’m awed by your strength, and your kindness.”

  Tell me I’m pretty.

  “When I look at you, Bunny—”

  Tell me I get you hard.

  “I see a woman I don’t deserve.”

  I shut my eyes.

  It was like listening to a total stranger describe the Statue of fucking Liberty. Some bronze paragon in a goddamn toga, seen from the deck of the Staten Island Ferry.

  Neither his lover, nor beloved—merely the embodiment of some principle he liked to imagine himself upholding, or, better yet, defending.

  Because that’s what decent men did.

  And Dean was still utterly convinced he was a decent man, so this was an occasion to feel really, really good about himself.

  For being so fucking decent.

  “I am absolutely dedicated to our marriage,” he continued. “With all my heart.”

  Tell me I’m better in bed than she is.

  “I’m dedicated to our family—”

  Tell me she’s not hotter, and tighter, and wetter.

  “I’m dedicated to the girls—”

  Tell me you never think of her when you’re fucking me, because I’m the best you’ve ever had—so good there’s no room for anyone else in your head.

  “To our future—”

  Tell me she could never get you off the way I do. That you love my mouth and my tits and my ass. That you love how I feel when you’re sunk all the way in. That you can’t wait to taste me again.

  “I will never again do anything to jeopardize what we have. It’s too precious. I admire you too much.”

  We’d been in the same position for what, five minutes now? He’d carried me across the entire house with all my weight bearing down on the juncture of my pussy and his belly.

  And the point of contact had moved lower on him when he’d laid me down on the sofa: the full length of his cock now pressed against the core of me.

  Soft.

  So limp one might think he possessed no genitals at all.

  I twitched again. A bit of grind.

  Nothing.

  I looked up into his eyes.

  He’d started to fucking cry.

  “Everything Setsuko loved about me—”

  Loves.

  “Every single thing was something I’d learned from you. Something you taught me. The way I dress—”

  He choked on that, couldn’t finish voicing the thought.

  Tell me you think I’m pretty.

  Go ahead, lie.

  I deserve that much.

  “What was I supposed to do?” he said, sobbing. “A beautiful woman in her twenties fell in love with me… what was I supposed to do?”

  I’m only thirty-goddamn-two.

  I shoved him away from me, sitting straight up.

  “What were you supposed to do?” I hissed.

  He covered his face with his hands.

  “You were supposed to keep your dick in your pants, Dean. Bring it home to your goddamn wife unbesmirched by the slime in your trollop’s malicious, conniving little cunt.”

  I shoved him away from me.

  His back hit the edge of the coffee table, wrenching it across the carpet.

  It was made of solid cherry, my uncle Hunt’s wedding present to us both.

  My uncle had built it himself: planed its planks smooth, joined them seamlessly, rubbed beeswax into the grain until it glowed, warm and red.

  Inset at its center was a bronze plaque that had once graced the brick wall encircling the lushness of my grandparents’ no-longer-extant rose garden.

  Dean and I had been married there. Standing on a pathway of bricks my great-great-grandfather had made out of Centre Island clay. Surrounded by a hundred friends.

  I’d been the tenth generation to live there. The last.

  “I’m sorry,” my husband said. “I’m so sorry.”

  He sank down in front of me, ass dropping to rest on his heels.

  He covered his face once more.

  Penitent. Sobbing.

  “You were supposed to be kind,” I said, yanking his hands down. “That’s what you were supposed to do, you worthless piece of shit.”

  “Bunny—” He couldn’t even look at me.

  “That’s what you were supposed to do,” I said.

  I got to my feet.

  Left him there.

  Went upstairs to gather our daughters in my arms.

  46

  Bunny—”

  I was back downstairs and Dean had followed me into the kitchen.

  “It’s over,” he said. “I’ve ended it. Everything.”

  “When would that have been, Dean?” I said. “While the two of you were having dinner with her father in Tokyo, yukking it the day Cary fucking died?”

  I lowered Parrish and India to the floor. Got up. Turned around to face him.

  He went pale.

  “Or maybe it was last night,” I said, “when you had so much work to do at the office?”

  He didn’t answer that.

  “Tell me, Dean. Was she sitting on your lap when I called, or did you have her bent over your desk with her little pink panties yanked down?”

  He turned red, then. />
  “Or maybe she was kneeling on the floor in front of you, sucking you off with that prissy little mouth.”

  “I’d never do that… I never did.”

  “Never did what, Dean? Let her blow you? Give me a fucking break.”

  “I made a point of not ever taking time away from you and the girls to be with her. Not once. Setsuko understood.”

  “How very thoughtful of you both,” I said. “How touching.”

  He stood there, staring at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “I have to go to work.”

  “Yeah, I bet you do. I just bet.”

  “Bunny, it’s over.”

  I crossed my arms.

  “I ended it the morning of Cary’s funeral,” he said. “When I took the girls out in the wagon. I asked her to meet me at Pearl Street. By the sand pit they like to play in.”

  I thought I might puke again. “You took our daughters—”

  “So she’d know I meant it. So she wouldn’t try to—”

  So she wouldn’t try to fuck you.

  Because you wouldn’t have turned her down.

  He dropped his head. “I wanted to show her why. That I was serious. Make her remember what was most important to me. What mattered more to me than she did, than she ever could. Parrish and India—”

  Not me. Never me.

  “Bunny,” he said, sidling up to me. “Don’t cry. Please don’t cry… it’s killing me—”

  “You can’t even—”

  “What?”

  I just looked at him, so empty. So goddamn sad.

  “What, Bunny? Tell me. Tell me anything you want to say.”

  “You can’t even lie, right now?”

  “I’m not lying.”

  And then I wasn’t crying anymore. “You can’t pretend you ended it because I mattered to you, even a little?”

  “Oh, my God, that’s not what I—”

  “You couldn’t have tried to make me believe for one second that I crossed your mind at all, in any of this?”

  “Bunny, of course you—”