Strange Fits of Passion

by Anita Shreve

  ***

  You understand that it was physical. Before the night was over, I was in a room alone with him. We hadn't even had a meal. There were silk ropes, or possibly that came later. This was a movie I had never seen before, might never have seen if I had not said yes to his questions. I was frightened, but I was ravenous, complicitous. I thought, believed, that this was love, and before the night was out, I had said the word, or he had. We said the word together, and christened what we did.

  He went to Israel in the morning, and I went back to work. I think the others must have seen it: I was like a toy top someone had spun and walked away from. I did not know for how long he would be away. He hadn't told me, and I couldn't ask the editor—it was too obvious. I did my work, took on more and more, stayed late into the night at the office, as the others did. The longer I stayed in that building, the more chance I had of catching some brief word of Harrold, overhearing his name in a bit of gossip from the field. There was nothing else I wanted to do. At night I did not go out. It was enough just to sit in my room and think of him, replaying the same images over and over again in my mind.

  I was moved from Farewell to Trends. This was thought to be a step up.

  I think it was then that the pattern began—his leaving and his coming back, my never knowing when he would come back, so that always I seemed to be living life on the edge, keen and waiting. I was sitting in my cubicle, on the phone doing an interview, when he walked into the room and looked at me. He'd been gone for seven weeks; I had not had a word from him. He'd been to Israel and Nigeria, Paris and Saigon. I didn't even know for certain if he had another woman; I had imagined, from time to time, that it was someone else he wrote to. I didn't know then that he wouldn't ever write or call when he was away; it was part of his plan, to keep me always waiting.

  He came to my desk. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. He said that he had work to do—two, three days at the most. He asked me how I'd been. I had the sense that we were being looked at, watched by others. I said that I'd been fine. He said that on the third night we would go to dinner. It wasn't a question.

  So that's how it began. Do you need other details? He had a large apartment on the Upper West Side, large and mostly empty. I had a tiny room in the Village, and so we lived at his place. He had been to Yale, and his father was a wealthy man. They were from Rhode Island, on the water. Harrold was twenty-eight when I met him, established at the magazine. It was understood that he was meant to be a star. His mother had died when he was a boy, and there was me without a father, and somehow that seemed fitting: Our backgrounds were symmetrical.

  What else can I tell you about him?

  He had a habit of running his fingers through his hair, and he would seldom comb it. He didn't eat breakfast, he was hard to rouse when asleep, and he almost always ordered eggs for lunch. He typed with two fingers, very fast—a dazzling display, I always thought, of compensation.

  He was addicted to the news. He read four papers a day and never missed a TV news program if he was at home. When he read, he always had the radio on, to music or to the news. He said it was a consequence of having lived alone so long. He couldn't bear the silence.

  His taste in music was contemporary. He liked Dylan and the Stones and a guitarist named John Fahey. He played them loud and often. But though he liked the music of the moment, he didn't take to drugs: They made him lose control, he said, and made him queasy. Instead he liked to drink in bars—as if he were a character from another era. He liked bars in foreign cities best, he said. The women there intrigued him.

  He was often out of town, and later sometimes I was too. When he was home, we'd go to a bar, then to bed, then I'd cook a meal. We'd be up until two or three in the morning. We never had people to the apartment, and we never went to parties. This was essential, that we be alone: My dependence on him must be absolute.

  I think now about that isolation, how complete it was. The world around us, as you know, was jagged and screaming. There were the riots, and there was the war. We knew about these things, often wrote about them for the magazine. Harrold was a witness, and sometimes so was I. But strangely the reporting and the writing isolated us even more. What we wrote were words, like the ones we read in newspapers. There would be an event, and we would be above it or beside it. If you were there to tell the facts, you didn't have to feel. Indeed, we thought detachment from the world essential. And if, in the office, we could talk about a protest or a killing because we had the facts, these were not the stories that mattered in the empty rooms at night.

  ***

  We weren't like other couples. How can I make you understand? In the office there would be the heat between us, and possibly others felt it, but in public he went his way and I went mine. I was seen to be friendlier with other people than I was with him. We did not have lunch together or touch in the office or display the kind of public possessiveness that new couples sometimes revel in. What we were and did was secret, and even when we married, the sense of secrets kept us separate from the world, like women veiled in harems.

  Later, as a consequence, I would think: There is no one, no one in the world, that I can tell this to.

  Sometimes—often, in fact—I would wonder: Why had Harrold chosen me? For I had sometimes found among his things pale-blue air letters from women in Madrid or Berlin.

  It was my hair, he'd say, teasing me; it was a flame that had drawn him to me like a moth. But no, really, he'd add later, coming toward me, backing me up against a wall, it was my feet. He liked small feet, and mine were white and neat, and had I ever noticed that before? Or later still, and in a more serious mood, he'd say it was the way we worked together: We had minds that thought alike when it came to putting words on paper.

  But once, when we were in a taxi late at night, speeding uptown from the office on a rain-soaked street, the lights swimming on the wet pavement, I asked him why, and he said lightly—his hand was resting on my thigh, his smile had started at the corner of his mouth—You let me have you.

  ***

  I wrote my mother. I wrote that I had met a man and that I loved him. I said that he was smart and well respected at the magazine. I said that he loved me too. I told her that he was tall and dark and handsome, and that when she met him she would find him charming.

  I knew that she would like this letter.

  The things I wrote were all the truth, but they didn't tell her anything like the truth, did they?

  The truth was that we drank. There would be the drinking in the bars, with all the world around us. And then there'd be the wine, the open bottle and the glasses beside the bed. Or champagne in a bucket; we often had champagne. The drinking then was festive: Every night was a celebration. The empty rooms in his apartment would be lit with candles, and I would find, in the morning, clothes in a hallway, delicate glasses beside the tub. I cooked in a robe he gave me. It was navy cotton terry cloth, too big for me and I felt small and lost inside it. There was a round table in the kitchen—a wrought-iron table with a smooth glass top. Around it there were dark-green metal chairs such as you'd see in France. And there would be the red wine on the table for the meal, and it seemed to me that we would drink until the fevers, both erotic and mundane had burned their of us and we could go to sleep then.

  I had had a lover in college, but he was just a child by comparison. He had no dark secrets that he let me see. Of course, I was a child then too, and though we drank sweetened drinks on weekends, it was an innocent pastime, meaningless.

  With Harrold, the drinking was different: We were drowning.

  I have memories. I remember this: We were in the bedroom after work. It was late, a hot night, and I was in my slip. He lit a cigarette and leaned across the darkness to give it to me. I did not smoke often, but I sometimes smoked with him. His cigarettes were foreign, and I liked them. He bought them on his trips, and they had a dark and fruity scent, like flowers in a damp woods.

  He was still dressed in his clothes from work
. I remember particularly the cloth of his shirt, a stiff blue oxford weave. He had his tie on, but he had loosened it. We smoked together and we didn't speak, but I had the sense that soon something would happen.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed, my legs crossed, my feet bare. He was sitting not far from me, slouched a bit in his chair, his legs crossed too, one ankle resting on a knee. He was watching me, studying my face, examining my gestures as I smoked, and I felt self-conscious under his scrutiny and wanted to laugh to deflect him.

  But then he stood and took my cigarette from me and put it out. He lifted me under the arms and laid me down on the bed. I remember that he was hovering over me, hovering in that way he had, and that he hadn't taken his clothes off. He raised my wrists to the brass bars of the headboard. He undid the knot of his tie. I felt the small stab of his belt buckle against my rib cage, the cloth of his shirt against my face, the silk of his tie against my wrist. I inhaled the cloth of his shirt—I loved the smell of him through the weave. And later, when he was saying that he loved me and was calling out my name, I thought: When he had been watching me, had he read this scene on my face?

  It was morning. I was standing by a closet and a mirror, getting dressed for work. I had on a dress I liked—it was cotton, muslin, a long smock from India, and had intricate hand embroidery on the bodice. He was in front of his bureau, lifting socks from a drawer. He had on his pants but not his shirt. He turned to me and examined me—a long, cold stare of examination. He said, You should wear your skirts shorter; you have nice legs. And then: Don't put your hair up. It looks better long.

  I took the pins out of my mouth, put them on a table. I unwound my hair, let it fall.

  He said, You could look sexy if you wanted to. You've got the raw material.

  I had known him three months then, or maybe four.

  That day, on my lunch hour, I walked to a department store and bought two skirts that were shorter than those I normally wore. But even as I handed the money to the woman behind the counter, I was thinking: He is changing me. Or rather: He wants me to be different than I am.

  The presents started then. Harrold had money and would bring me things from Europe or from California. Or from Thailand or Saigon. At first the gifts were jewelry and sometimes clothes. Then mostly clothes—beautiful, expensive fabrics I could not afford and would not have bought for myself. The clothes were unlike those I'd ever worn before—sensuous and exotic. I put them on to please him and seemed to change as I wore them, to become the person he'd imagined.

  And then there was the lingerie. He bought me risque bits from Paris or the East. He said I had to wear them to the office, and only he would know, and I thought, talking to myself, trying to still just the smallest voice of worry: This is harmless and fun, isn't it?

  He said I should stand up straighter; I should unclasp my hands; I should stop a nervous gesture I had of fingering my hair.

  He said to me, I tell you these things for your own benefit. Because I love you. Because I care about you.

  He was my mentor at the office. I had a modest talent only, but he took me in hand. This was exciting, you understand, being tutored by him. He had power, and I sometimes found that irresistible. In the bar, after work, he would look at a story I had done, suggest improvements. I'd be stumped in my reporting, and he'd have a name to call, a golden source. He told me, too, how to talk to the people above me—what to show them, what to withhold. When I was sick once, he did my story for me; he even wrote it in my style.

  He told me I should refuse to write only about trends, and I said no, I'd lose my job. But he goaded me and pushed me, and one day I did as he had said to do, and I didn't lose my job: I was moved to the national desk; I was given a bigger cubicle.

  I took everything he offered me, acquiesced to his design. This was the bargain we had made, wasn't it?

  ***

  We had been together a year, maybe longer. I had gotten home before him. I was in the kitchen, at the table, reading a newspaper. I didn't want a drink. I hadn't gone to the bar to meet him. I had a headache. Actually I had the flu but didn't know it yet. I heard him in the hallway, and I stopped reading. There was his key in the lock, his footsteps in the hallway. I realized with some surprise that I didn't want to see him, I wanted to be alone. Do I need a reason? I was tired. I didn't want to have to give anything—or to have to take from him, either. It was the first time since we'd met I'd felt this way.

  He came into the kitchen, and he must have seen it. Perhaps it was in the way I wouldn't look at him and kept my eyes on the newspaper: Something in me resisted this intrusion.

  He took his jacket off, hung it on a chair. He pulled his tie loose, unbuttoned his collar. He put his hands on his hips, looked at me. He said, Don't you want a drink? and I said, No, I have a headache. He said, Have a drink; it'll help the headache, and I said, No, but thanks.

  He came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders. He began to massage the muscles at the base of my neck. I should have relaxed for him, but I couldn't. I understood this gesture. He would touch me even when I didn't want it, especially when I didn't want it.

  I tried to sit there, pliant, thinking: This will be over soon. But his fingers kneaded the knots in my shoulders too vigorously. I wrenched away suddenly, stood up. I was going to say, I'm not feeling well, I'm better off alone tonight, but he grabbed my wrist, held it.

  I don't remember everything that happened—the room seemed to spin around me very fast. He had me up against the refrigerator; the handle was in my back. His strength was absolute: I'd had only hints of this before. He raised my skirt to my waist. I tried to push him away from me, but he slammed my wrist up against the metal. I felt a sharp stab of pain; I thought that he had broken it. I was frightened then. I knew that he could hurt me, was hurting me. He was a large man—have I said that before?—and though I fought, my fighting him was useless.

  And then I stopped resisting and became a part of it, a passive player. And it seemed, when it was over, and he was holding me, and I didn't want to think about the implications of those few moments, that possibly love or sex or violence was simply a matter of degree. Seen in a certain light, was what had happened against the refrigerator so very different from all that had gone before?

  He carried me to the bed and wrapped me in a blanket. He put ice cubes on my wrist—it was bruised but not broken. He put his mouth on my wrist and said that he was sorry, but curiously, I understood that he meant he was sorry the wrist was hurt, not that he was sorry for the act.

  He made a meal for us, and we ate it on the bed. He seemed grateful to me, and I was aware of a strange sense of our having grown closer to each other, more intimate, as though the more risks we took, the more secrets we shared, the further we pushed the boundaries of what was done, the more entwined we would become.

  In the night I got the fever, and it is possible I am confusing the sequence of what was said or felt, but that was when he wrote my story for me. And that was when he asked me to marry him.

  In the months and years that followed, it was often like that: He'd take something from me, or hurt me, and then offer me something larger in return. And if I took the something larger—a promise or a commitment or a dream—it was understood that I forgave him.

  He never said, then or ever, the word rape, and I could not say the word aloud myself.

  I said that I would marry him. He went off to Prague to do a story. I had his apartment to myself. I was sick with the flu. I was sometimes feverish. I didn't go to work.

  Already I felt addicted, or obsessed. I would drink alone, just as we had done together, because it was a thread, it connected us. I would walk to windows, bare windows looking out at traffic and at buildings, and sit for hours, thinking just of him and of us. I would wander rooms and touch his things, go through pockets to find bits of paper that would tell me more about him. I read his notebooks on his desk, tried to think the way he thought.

  Yet even as I did, I knew that we
were not like other people. Or if we were like other people, this was a side of love I had not heard anything about. Harrold had had a vision of who I might be, had seen this vision even on the first day we met, was relentless in his pursuit of it. Who I actually was or might have been was merely clay to play with. He saw me as a star, like himself, his protege, his possession. Perhaps I am oversimplifying this, but I don't think so. I was in trouble only if I resisted the vision he had—only if I spoke or acted or felt in a manner that was incompatible with his design.

  Was this my failing, then? My failure to embrace wholeheartedly this new self that was being offered to me, even as I wore the expensive lingerie to the office, shortened my skirts, listened avidly to his advice?

  For always there was something in me, as yet unidentified, unrecognizable, that resisted the shaping and the molding. In the beginning it seemed that this resistance was maverick, merely confusing to me, there almost despite my best interests or my wishes.

  And later, when I did resist at last, his repertoire was extensive, magisterial: subtle scorn, veiled ridicule, icy silence, absence, presence, absence. He was skilled, a virtuoso, a concert pianist.