The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

Oz Spies The Love of a Strong Man

From The Ontario Review

This is a story that does not begin and end; it simply crept up on those involved, without warning, and will continue to haunt us, to hang over us after the trial is over, after he has died. We will remember. How can it be told? It started, perhaps, when we met: I, fourteen, new white sneakers, tight jeans, and long brown hair to the middle of my back, chewing gum; he, seventeen, shaggy blond hair brushing his chin, tight white T-shirt stretched over his muscular chest, torn jeans, and a posed cigarette drooping out of his mouth. He said, “Nice weather we’re having,” in a low, grim growl, and of course I had to respond to that, the bold contrast of the everyday phrase and the tough-guy voice straight out of the movies. Then, I loved his strength, loved the way his huge arm draped around my thin shoulders, the fact that everyone knew that he could have rubbed their boyfriends’ faces in the dirt had he wanted to, yet he didn’t, and had never been in a fight. He still hasn’t so much as been punched. Later, when we married, his strength seemed to be a mirage, like the muscle builders who do nothing more with their muscles than rub oil on them and pose, and I wondered when the strength, the dominance, the love I always wanted had slipped away.

But that can’t be where it started, because I knew nothing at fourteen, and he had done nothing. I don’t believe that the snatched packs of gum slipped into his pocket at the grocery store, or the school suspension that resulted because his teacher said his constant habit of falling asleep in class was insubordination, were related to the things that happened later. I did not find out until a couple months ago, when it had been going on for years, and we lived on a cul-de-sac with wide open manicured lawns, and a strange, grainy suspect drawing appeared in the papers and all over town, and the wide chin and long nose looked uncannily like him, and of course the arrest several days later confirmed my suspicions. In some moments I wonder if it is all a horrible coincidence, or if a disgruntled patient framed him, and we will soon be on CNN talking about the incompetence of our local police force. But I have no proof of this. I refuse to go to the trial; I cannot be one of those pitiable wives who stands by her husband professing his innocence, crying and winging her hands in court, wearing a nice blue skirt suit and borrowed pearls, whining, “He’s such a good man; he’s innocent, dentists don’t do these things!”

Only if I start with the arrest, then you will never understand how I came to be his wife, the way that there can be a marriage in which so much is unknown, and unknowable. I will never know much of it, much of him. Aren’t all marriages like that? After years of breaking up and making up, we eloped just as he entered school to become a dentist, a job he chose because I mentioned that it pays well, and it comes with none of the life-or-death decisions of being a doctor, just thoughts about cavities and crowns. A low-stress occupation, just as my job at the makeup counter is low-stress. We went to work, we took vacations to Hawaii, shopped for antique furniture in flea markets.

How can someone live with another and not see things, you will wonder, how could anyone marry, or love, such a person? Maybe I should back up and start earlier, perhaps even to his childhood, and show how he was the victim, the abuses that he suffered from his father, and let those make him less of a monster. But he did not speak to me of the nature of those abuses, other than the cold sweats of his nightmares, and I did not discover the details about them any sooner than any other regular, newspaper-reading citizen: “Accused Was Victim of Child Abuse,” the papers claimed in bold 30-point font on the Local Interests page. I am married to a local interest.

Friends have asked me how I am doing, say “Are you OK, honey?” with their brows furrowed as they pat me on the arm. But I know that what they really want to know is how could he do those things, how could I be married to him, and when am I finally going to break down into a hysterical mess in public so that they can tell all their friends and the National Enquirer about it. I just keep telling them, “Oh, you know,” when, of course, they don’t, and probably thank God that they are not living my life. Recently, they’ve stopped calling.

I reach up over my head and grab the remote from my bedside table and flip on the television. A pregnant reporter in a beige suit stands in front of the county courthouse and says, “All seven victims are scheduled to testify during the trial of accused rapist Henry Calston, which will begin next week. Calston faces seven counts each of sexual assault, kidnapping, and breaking and entering. It is rumored that there may be other victims who have not yet come forward,” and I quickly turn the television off. My heart pounds and I scan the expansive master bedroom with the fireplace he always said provided great ambience but never used because that would have made it ash-filled and dirty, and I look over the stacks of cardboard boxes just to make sure that no one is here. I walk over to my closet and open and shut the door, then return to my space on the carpet with my back against the wall, my body against one of the matching cherry tables that frame our king-size bed. From here I can see the two windows that overlook our street and the bedroom door. A worn romance novel, sent to me by his mother, sits on my bedside table, and I flip through it, watching the black and white merge into a gray blur as the pages move faster and faster.

I put down the book and remember the time that we went to see a romantic comedy about a lonely violinist and her truck-driving suitor and Henry said, right in the middle of the scene where the truck driver filled the violinist’s bedroom with handpicked daisies, “People that different don’t fall in love,” loud enough that he was shushed from all sides. I answered, “But would she really have anything more in common with another violin player? Or any stringed-instrument player?” Henry laughed, grabbed my hand, and kissed the back of it. Moments like this seemed inconsequential at the time, but now, I search for meaning in every memory. I wonder if he kissed my hand because he felt too guilty over what he was doing to kiss my lips, or if he was trying to act normal and hand-kissing seemed like the regular husband thing to do. But, thinking about that day at the movie theater, and how Henry took off his sweater and gave it to me, so that I wore my own ribbed red crewneck sweater underneath his huge gray wool sweater, and the way my nose was filled with the spicy, dominant scent of his sweat, I cannot find anything other than a couple at the movies. It makes me shiver.

I cannot watch movies anymore because I always hear what Henry would say about them, I cannot read, I cannot watch television, and I don’t really want to have to see or talk to anyone at all. I have nothing to do but pluck stray dark fibers out of the white of our carpet and think about what my husband did. So, I sit on our white bedroom floor in my worn black sweatpants, stare at the lines in the beige wallpaper, and think of the answers to your questions.

Now, all of my memories are contaminated, the picture on my table that shows him in his dark gray suit standing next to Elvis in the Chapel of Love where we eloped mixed with a scratchy pencil drawing of a victim sobbing on the witness stand, to-do lists written on Post-Its that I find still stuck inside of the closet and medicine cabinet juxtaposed against the pleading letters sent to me from jail, and it is the same handwriting, and that does not seem fair. It should be easy to separate, to split the lover from the rapist, to cut them apart, to distill my memories, to pasteurize them. That is what I am most angry about: he has left nothing untouched.

I glance at the clock: 1:00 am. I crawl onto the bed and lay flat on my back on top of the comforter. I leave the overhead light on and stare at the ceiling until the morning sun creeps through the windows. I shower, get dressed, and then sit at our huge dining room table with a cup of coffee and wait until it is 9:00 and I can leave for work. I sit on his side of the table now, so that I don’t have to stare at his empty chair and picture the way he sat up perfectly straight while he read the comics — never the front page or even the business news, Henry only read the Lifestyles and Sports sections of the paper. He always sat up rigidly, though his eyes were heavy with sleep. I try to remember ever seeing Henry relax, and I can’t. He reminded me of a dog just given the command to freeze, poised and waiting for another command so he would know what to do next.

I drive through the thick suburban traffic and wonder if the other drivers, all alone in their cars as I am in mine, know who I am married to. I wonder if they know who they are married to. Perhaps their husbands are worse than mine, perhaps my husband is innocent and one of them will soon be in my place, hiding in the master bedroom and searching for the illusive moment when her life went wrong.

At the pastel-pink makeup counter, I give makeovers, to encourage women to buy skin creams and lotions that we both know will not remove their wrinkles and leave them with a younger, happier life, and I almost forget his supposed crimes. I pick up the phone to call him, careful to hold the white receiver away from my cheek so that my foundation does not leave a light brown stain, and then remember that he is in jail, not performing root canals, and he doesn’t have a phone, and even if he did, charming anecdotes about the abuses of eye shadow are not what he would want to hear. It is not as easy as it should be to cut off your now-criminal husband, not like a hangnail or even a gangrene-infested limb. I could deal with the ghost pains left after amputation, but I cannot will myself to amputate.

“Making a call, Darlene?” says one of the other makeup girls, Ali, who wears black fishnet stockings every day. I wonder if it’s the same pair.

“No,” I answer, and put the phone back onto the receiver. She crosses the small space from the sunless tanning creme display to where I stand, by the phone, the cash register, and the sticky sweet newly released perfume called Luminescent Honey. Ali and I used to go out for margaritas after work, but after Henry’s arrest, I caught her on the six o’clock news saying that she always thought Henry was a little too quiet, and that I once came to work with a black eye. That black eye had been from a skiing accident, in which I tumbled down the slope and kicked myself in the face with my ski, and she knew it. I haven’t spoken to her, except for work-related conversations, since I saw that clip.

“How are you?” says Ali, stretching out the word “are” so that it covers the space three words normally fill in her rapid babble.

“Really, how are you?”

“I’m considering suicide,” I say, just to see what she will do. Her face freezes into its pat expression of concern and her eyes double in size so that she looks exactly like the life-sized doll head I had as a kid that you could put makeup on and then wash clean before curling its hair into a huge synthetic bouffant. “But then, who would you have to talk about?”

She pulls down her white lab coat, the kind that we all wear over our black clothes, that I suspect are intended to make us look like experts. My husband wore a white lab coat, too. I wonder what he wore when he did those things, if he had a special outfit, or if he wore his clothes, the clothes that I always bought for him because he hated to shop. My stomach rumbles and I worry that I will throw up all over Ali and her fishnets and lab coat and green eye shadow. She is still staring at me. Two of the girls over at one of the other makeup counters are looking at us and talking in low voices, as they have been for the last few months. I want to tell them that I know what they’re talking about, that they’re talking about me and Henry, but I don’t want to mention his name.

“How about that new perfume, that Luminescent Honey? It’s something, isn’t it?” I call over to them in my most threatening voice. They smile wide with their glossy lips and nod, the way that you smile and nod at the corsage-wearing women who try to get you to join their church.

Ali shakes her head at me. “Have you thought of a professional, Darlene? Because this problem of yours is getting to be too much for me. I can’t help you. Maybe you should see a professional.” She walks back over to the sunless tanning creme and stays on the opposite side of the makeup counter.

The day passes quickly; when there are no makeovers to give, 1 concentrate on stacking the tiny boxes of eye shadow in neat rows, making sure that the labels all point out and are right-side up, and that each of the 136 colors are in the correct slot. I ignore Ali, who has crossed over to the rival makeup counter and whispers with the other two girls, and I do not take a lunch break. One woman who comes to the department store to replace her powder says, “Looks like you’re doing all the work around here,” nodding toward Ali and the other girls who are now sipping on lattes, which Ali went to get for them all, without asking me if I wanted one. I smile at the woman, just like those girls smiled at me earlier, feeling my berry-glossed lips crackling under the effort, and take her money. I wish I had never met Henry. At seven, I return home, kick off my heels at the door, change into my sweatpants, grab my saltines and 7-Up, and return to my seat on the master bedroom floor.

The phone rings and I stand up and sink my toes into the thick white carpet as I walk over to his bedside table, which holds our smooth white replica of a 1940s phone with a gold-colored mouth and ear piece and rotary dial.

It is his mother, who asks me to go see him for the third time in as many days, says “Darlene, darling,” which is how she’s always addressed me when trying to get something, perhaps thinking that the alliteration will sway me, “He’s all alone in that jail. It’s been months.”

“I am all alone here. You’re all alone in Wichita, Eleanor. Loneliness is not a reason.” In fact, Eleanor moved to Wichita after her husband’s death, perhaps to escape her memories of him, and has since created a life centered on being alone. The only time that she has any kind of voluntary interaction with people, as far as I know, is when she goes to church, or calls us.

“What about all those lovely gifts he always got you, to show how much he loves you? That monthly subscription to the flower-delivery service? He took care of you when you had that lump scare.”

“I left the order form for the flowers on the counter. And that was a false alarm. This is different.” Even if he did go with me to the doctor to get it checked out, he probably wouldn’t have continued to hold my hand and go on doctor visits if it had been cancer, if I had gone through chemo. But the moment I think that, I know it’s not true. I remember how, at the doctor’s, he brought me all seven types of soda from the vending machine because he wasn’t sure what I wanted. He always went anywhere I asked him to go. I chew on a cracker. All I’ve been able to eat since it started is salty, flat things: anchovies, beef jerky, saltines. I don’t know what that means.

“Different how? Husbands and wives stand together in a crisis.” I wonder how to get her off the phone. She isn’t here, visiting her son, standing by his side, she just sends checks to his lawyer, and she probably would try to send care packages full of gingerbread and clean underwear if they would let her. “Or they cause a crisis, “ I say. The cracker sucks my mouth dry and makes it painful to talk. I wish I hadn’t said that.

“Oh,” she sucks in through her teeth, as though I’ve punched her in the stomach. There is silence for a moment, then she continues. I can tell that she’s decided to be sweet to me during this conversation no matter what, even if I tell her that her son is a creepy fucker like I did the last time we spoke. “Those things with my ex-husband are years past. Henry loves us. Handmade cards, that’s love.”

I swallow my cracker, wash it down with 7-Up. I drink 7-Up during any turmoil, it seems to calm my stomach. It hasn’t been working. “How do you know he does?”

Her voice shifts and becomes harder, deeper, and I can hear the rough edge in her throat left over from her twenty-seven years of smoking. “I always told Henry you should have renewed your vows.”

This was the type of comment that, if my husband were still sleeping underneath our deep blue down comforter and not the worn blanket I imagine in his jail cell, would have made me laugh. We were married by someone who asked, “Do you promise to hang on to your hunka hunka burning love till he croaks?” But I have found myself drawn to churches in the last months, pacing up and down streets in front of their imposing permanence, wishing that I could bloody my knees from too much prayer. I wonder what type of responsibility I have in what my husband did. He always prayed, when he thought that I wasn’t looking, mumbling softly just after we got into bed, his hands clenched in a double fist. Why had he prayed, I wonder. Guilt? Solace? Forgiveness? Or was it just an automatic habit instilled by his Presbyterian mother that he simply could not stop performing, like a trained circus elephant’s tricks?

I realize that Eleanor is talking again. “Did you hear what I said?”

“I’ve got to go. Bye,” I say, then hang up the phone, hearing her screeches of “Darlene? Darlene!” as I move the handset toward the receiver. It’s unfortunate she didn’t have any other children. None of her other eggs were strong enough to withstand her.

What did she know, I wonder as I return to my seat on the carpet. Perhaps I can blame her, for staying with a man who beat her and her son, for not putting my husband in enough baseball leagues, for failing to notice signs of his criminal future. But what signs were there that I did not notice? He was a professed atheist who prayed, for one, and he always had insomnia and I, a heavy sleeper, never even knew which nights he wandered through our house and which nights he lay beside me. I should have known that, at the very least I should have recognized his physical presence. My stomach lurches, then drops, leaving me with a queer bottomless feeling.

I slip on my pink flip-flops and go outside. I wander up and down my street in the cool night, as though his insomnia has been passed to me, and search for signs. In crazed moments I think that I might redeem myself as his wife by catching another man trying to assault a teenage girl or, better yet, a grandmother, a sign of an even more depraved mind than my husband’s. All of the houses on our street have the shades drawn, and there’s no sign of people, other than the muted yellow of my neighbors’ lights and the occasional blue flicker of a television. The night air makes me shiver, but my body is covered in a kind of sticky sweat, and I rush home to take a shower. I exfoliate and scrub hard so that my skin turns red. I use two kinds of perfumed soap and a body wash, and blast myself with water so hot that I cringe, but I cannot come out feeling clean.

The running water fills the silence of our three-bedroom two-bath, a new house in which the master suite takes up an entire floor, and I’ve filled it with heavy cardboard boxes. But why, though I have been able to box up his striped ties, the music boxes he gave me each year for our anniversary, and even the picture of the three-hundred-pound Elvis impersonator holding me, looking frightened and pale, that my husband took on our wedding day, can I not just throw them all out? I can’t even put the boxes in the basement, so they wait at the foot of our bed, next to his dresser and in his walk-in closet, a testament to the purgatory I’ve been forced into.

I curl up into our huge bed and stretch my hands across it and try to grasp its edges, but fail. I hear his voice in my head, teasing me, saying, “Did you think your arms grew since the last time that you tried, Darlene?” Our last fight took place on this bed, the night before they arrived at his office and arrested him early in the morning, before his first checkup. It was an old fight, as all fights and discussions in our married life seemed to be, filled with a strange sense of déjà vu that I, always practical, brushed off as a side effect of allergy medication. But now, it seems that we had to replay our fights until we got it right, until the truth finally emerged, and I always failed to uncover anything, to move on to a new fight. I wish

I could say that I’ve gained perspective and insight in the two months since his arrest, but really all I’ve gained is a constant mix of anger, sorrow, and loss that fills up my stomach.

~ * ~

“Ali’s boyfriend came by work today. He surprised her with sesame chicken, and a bouquet of orchids,” I told him that night, curled up on top of the bed in a lacy slip.

“Huh. Sesame — that’s the spicy one, right?” He kept his eyes on his sports magazine.

“No. Kung Pao’s spicy.” I took a deep breath, and said, “We could do that — go to lunch. On a weekday. You can take me to lunch.”

“I’m busy this week. Back-to-school surge of teeth cleaning.”

“You know what I mean. You can surprise me sometime, take me on a champagne picnic.”

“You can come meet me at the office. Or, on Saturday, we can go out, after we run to the store for the light bulbs and carpet shampoo.” He flipped a page and rubbed his nose.

I tried to keep my tone light, flirtatious. “Carpet shampoo? I’m worth a little effort, aren’t I? A little romance, a little bit of you taking the initiative. Y’know, grabbing me and kissing me. That stuff.” Then, I was beginning to redden because he did not understand what I meant, but now, I think that he did. He always understood, that I wanted him to be the one to start things, to be the aggressor, to complete the role I thought he played when I first met him by clutching me to him, in the rain, and kissing me hard. He just didn’t want to. He didn’t want me.

The argument that night eventually escalated into our common argument. “Why do you always have to push?” He exhaled into the folds of his magazine. “Let’s just talk about this in the morning.”

“Every other week, Henry. That’s what it’s come to.”

“It’s like eloping. You just can’t drop it, and so you shove until I agree.”

“Shove? Stop changing the subject. Admit it. Just admit it!”

“What?”

“You’re just not attracted to me any longer.” I sat up straight, while he sunk further back into the pillows surrounding him and kept his eyes on the magazine, as if he were praying that one of the football players pictured would leap off the page and save him.

“I’m tired. Let’s talk about this tomorrow.”

“You always want to talk about it tomorrow,” I whined, a line I knew I had heard and repeated countless times. He reached over and flipped off the light. I hissed, “Get yourself a dick, Henry,” and then curled up as close to the edge of the bed as I could. I didn’t expect to sleep; my whole body tingled as if someone kept pricking me with pins, and I wanted to stay awake until one of us apologized, and then fall asleep with my hand on his chest. But I did sleep, almost immediately, as though I were drugged, before either of us said anything more.

That night, I dreamed of the first time we ever slept together, on a heavy wool blanket spread out at night on a golf course, underneath the stars, when I thought that his soft, bumbling hands were because of inexperience, not the bland constant in our sex life that they were to become. Afterward, we lay naked on the blanket and Henry invented constellations and told me fairy tales to go along with them, just Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Beauty and the Beast, but with the characters’ names changed. His arms had wrapped securely around me, solid against my body, and I was thrilled by the thought that, if he squeezed just a little too tightly, he could have crushed me.

When I woke up the next morning, I had wanted to tell him about my dream — I always talked about my dreams on lazy weekend mornings, while we sipped coffee in bed — but it was a weekday, and he’d already left for work, where the cops waited in his aquarium-filled lobby to arrest him. One of the victims had recognized him — his picture was in the paper on page B5 in an article about the top five dentists in the city, the same day that the grainy suspect sketch took up half of B1 — and a DNA test matched him up to the semen in a condom he’d left, carelessly, at another girl’s house, at the base of the toilet, neatly wrapped in tissue. Henry kept his books in alphabetical order by author, in a separate bookshelf from mine. He would not miss the toilet.

The judge denied bail, saying Henry’s past travel history and the nature of the crimes made him a flight risk. In the first days after the arrest, our house was a flurry of reporters and police officers, and a high-profile lawyer with a manicure who’d just defended a quarterback in a domestic violence case offered to represent Henry. He pushed the trial through quickly, so that the prosecution would have less time to add to its growing pile of evidence, and for that, I am thankful. The attention at our house has drifted away, and focuses now on the courthouse, and on images of young, thin, tearful victims, all college students of the type who visit the makeup counter in giggling groups of five and tell us they’re getting married so that we will give them a free makeover.

The shrill ring of the phone wakes me. I know it is Eleanor before I roll across the bed to the phone and pick it up; no one else calls me.

“Look,” she says, “I can’t come out there.” Her voice has lost its brittle, bullying edge and is softer, almost apologetic.

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“Well, I can’t. I stayed with that man for him. And look what it did.” She begins to sob into the phone. “They’ll stone me right out of town. I should be stoned. But I can’t travel five hundred miles just for that. I’ve got a bad back.”

The strength of her guilt overwhelms me and I sit down on the floor. “You don’t have to come out, Eleanor. That’s all right.”

Her jagged sobs travel across the phone lines to me. “He’s still my son, though. Maybe he didn’t do it, Darlene. Maybe not. But if he did, he’s a monster, and I created him.”

I stay sitting cross-legged on the bed with the phone pressed against my ear and listen to her cry for what seems like hours, before she slips the phone onto the receiver and the dial tone buzzes across the line.

I stay seated, with the phone cradled in my lap. I watch the light crawl across the floor toward me as the sun rises. Eleanor has not disowned him, and she will not disown him, despite her anger and sadness. But I might still be able to cut myself off from him, to save one of us from this mess. I know I have to see him first, though, with the same kind of irrational deep-in-my-bones knowledge that Eleanor knows that she cannot come out. I need to know what I pushed him to. I wash my face and get dressed in a pair of gray slacks and a cream sweater, then slap on some makeup so that I don’t look like a ghost. The rouge only succeeds in making me look like an eerie combination of a corpse and a clown. 1 shrug and walk out the door.

I get into my car and begin to drive the silvery blue convertible, the one that my husband gave me for my last birthday, that I now think of as a guilt present, and hear the bass-voiced DJ mention him on the radio. It’s nothing more than they’ve been saying for the past month: crimes committed, neighbors interviewed, victims’ mothers crying, but somehow, it seems like it means something. Perhaps there are no coincidences, and, when our fat Elvis married us, after he asked, “Is there anyone to object to these two getting hitched?” and the Priscilla look-alike in a white minidress and tall black beehive who was taking pictures at the ceremony fainted, it meant something. I put my foot on the accelerator and drive faster toward the county jail, tell them who I am, submit to their weapons check, and find myself sitting across a scarred wooden table from my husband.

His hair looks darker than it has before, smoothed tightly against his skull, and his dry lips are riddled with cracks. “Darlene,” he says, then falls silent.

We stare at the table. My nail polish has chipped, and I can’t seem to move my eyes away from the jagged red. I blink, and, with my eyes closed, say, “Did you do it? To those girls? When I was at home, sleeping, did you?”

He says my name again, softer.

“I need to know.” I open my eyes, but I still can’t look at him.

“Are you leaving me?” His voice breaks.

“I’m trying.” I look up now at his face, the lines that have deepened, that I did not even notice when staring at him across our dining room table. “What, I mean, did I...”

He cuts me off, his voice stronger now. “Do you remember that last fight that we had? When I told you that you pushed me to elope? I was glad you pushed me, I am glad. If you leave, I understand, but I’m glad. Since I’ve been here, I’ve had this dream...”

“You’ve been sleeping?”

“Listen, I’ve had this dream,” he continues. He sounds so certain, more certain than I’ve ever heard him before. He looks so weak, but his voice, his conviction, seems so solid. I can’t quite find my soft-spoken husband in this Henry. “In it, you were cutting out my patient’s wisdom teeth, and then you handed things over to me to finish up.”

“Oral surgery?” I mumble. “I was performing oral surgery?”

He continues. “That dream.” He takes a deep breath. “The good stuff, Darlene, that was because of you.”

He is only saying this, I think, to get me to stay. I can’t only be responsible for the good parts, and imagine I had nothing to do with the rest. I wonder how many times I let him lie to me in the past several years. “Is this what you prayed about?” I ask.

“No, that was about us.”

I shake my head at him. I don’t believe him.

“Darlene, it’ll be all right,” he whispers, as though my name means something to him, as though it will mean something to me to hear it on his dry lips, and I recognize the man that I lived with, the way he chanted the same words again and again, until the words became a soothing white noise like the sounds of a heavy rain, when we waited together for the results of my lumpectomy.

“I’ll plead, if that’s what you want me to do. I’ll plead any way you’d like. We can still settle.”

“Stop. Please,” I shake my head. I do not want to know these details.

Then, he looks down at his hands, and I follow his glance. His hands look stiff, and weak, no longer the strong, smooth hands that had wrapped around my shoulders, and I suddenly know for certain, in a way that I had not known until now, that he did it, and that I loved him, all of him, while he did it. My chest heaves. Hadn’t I loved his strength, his ability to move all the furniture into our first apartment without help, and tried to make him stronger, to make him more forceful? Hadn’t that been how he did it, force, muscles?

These are the same hands that touched me, caressed my belly and breasts with shaky, unsure strokes and left those bruises, heavy welts, swollen eyes, and split lips on those girls, wrapped ropes around their wrists, shook them and tore them and held them down in their own beds. My lungs tighten and seem to quiver within me, then I close my eyes, stand up, and walk out of the room. He calls after me, but I do not answer. I’m afraid of what I’ll push him to, what lies I’ll let myself believe, if I stay. I always wanted a more aggressive lover, someone to grab me and dispense with the foreplay, someone who I would not have to seduce. That was what our arguments were always about — he was not strong enough, not man enough. Not to me, at least. It is horrible, what happened to those girls, but my shame is that I feel worse that it was not enough for him to do those things to me. If he had truly wanted me, with an overpowering desire that obliterates all thoughts, wouldn’t he have done those things to me? My hair would have been ripped from my skull, welts left on my neck from his grip, nose bloodied when he shoved me into the headboard, bite marks left on my breasts. Isn’t this what I dreamed about, the love of a strong man, a man who, in the middle of the night, stormed into my room and threw me down on the bed, twisted my arms behind me swiftly, tore off my nightgown and, with it, bits of my flesh, and left me covered with his sweat and semen and my own blood, forever changed by him? Had he truly loved me, it would have been me, and not them, and I have to leave him. This is the truly unspeakable, I think, as I look down at my own thin hands, their bony frailness, desperately in need of a manicure.