Verge

A WOMAN APOLOGIZING

She shut the silver cuff round her right wrist. It was done: wrists cuffed to brass. All there was left to do now was wait; 5:25, or 5:45 at the latest, if he missed the first train. Her wrists clanked against the brass bedposts. She pulled her arms out away from the bed, and her wrists just clinked, trapped, secure, something she couldn’t quite name. She smiled. She rattled her little wrists. She put her chin to her chest and looked down the length of her body. Her breasts flattened like fried eggs, each slipping toward its own armpit. Her rib cage rose and fell. Her belly dipped down like a flesh bowl. The curls of her pubes crinkled up toward air. She could feel herself becoming wet already. She spread her legs as far apart as they would go; her lips sucked open, the air opened her, she wiggled her toes in delight. She grinned at herself, by herself, to herself.

It had been, after all, a terrible argument. His face was darker than she had ever seen it, his teeth clicking between his words. He had been shirtless. Yeah, she had thought, he’s pumping up with anger at me, pulsing toward rupture at me, to me, about me. And she was angry as well—her too-pale skin all blotchy at the neck and chest, blood booming in each ear. She saw her own hands flare and fan in front of her like deranged birds now and again. She screamed so hard she felt the cords in her neck strain and screech, almost cracking against themselves. What a fight, one of those wonderful horrible ones.

She knew he was right. She was a control freak. It was true, if she asked him where he wanted to eat and he told her, inevitably she would say, Well, we could go there, but the wine selection is so much better at this other place, and he would of course agree. If she asked him what he wanted to do and he said, How about a movie? of course she would say, All right, but then we’ll miss the free jazz in the park. If he wanted eggs, she asked for pancakes; if he drove the car, she knew a better route; if he wanted to be on the bottom, she clamped his hips between her bony little knees and tugged until he rolled to the top; and if he wanted to be on top, she squirmed out from under like a chipmunk escaping a cat. And when he said, You don’t understand what it’s like to be black, she would say, You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and there was nothing he or anyone else could say to that.

But that day he’d just had it, he said, and he threw a glass of gin to the floor when she said, Jesus, but she was tired of having to decide everything for the two of them. The second the words left her mouth, she knew she ought to suck them back in, but it was too late, and he just snapped. And then she really blew it: She said, as if she didn’t know not to, You must really feel a need to attack me. And then thought, What a jerk. Why can’t I just let the fight go on naturally? Honestly, just quit the debate tactics and listen, that’s what he always told her, and he was right. She didn’t want to lose him, after all, he was the only good thing in her whole rotten life. If she could just develop a self to police the self that kept screwing up, a little invisible self that could stop the real her just in time.

So after he grabbed his blue shirt like a flag and slammed the door shut on her, she was left sitting there with her marvelous anger and her stupid control. She bit the inside of her cheek as hard as she could and closed her eyes tight enough for tears and pounded the top of her head, saying, Dumb, dumb, dumb.

She tried to think how to apologize—make him stir-fry and flan for dessert? spill rose petals from the door to the bubble-filled bath?—but nothing felt serious enough. How to make it up to him, how to exorcise her controlling witch-self?

How proud she was when she finally thought of it: an act of total submission. What sweeter gift could a controlling woman give a wounded man? She was so excited that she ran out that minute, caught the subway up several more blocks—they’d been there dozens of times, admiring the nipple clamps, fingering the leather, faces flushing at the plugs. They loved these stores, loved to be in them, loved to buy gels and magazines and arcane contraptions and then go home and work each other into lather and sweat and dripping delirium. She remembered the night they bought a piercing kit—how she squeezed the skin around his nipple, how the beautiful dark bump rose like a kiss toward her, how she slid the silver point through to the other side as their foreheads pressed together. She remembered the night he bent over her like a tender archaeologist, how she sat up on her elbows trying to see, though all she could really make out was his furrowed brow, his eyelashes, the top of his head, his fingers working as the point went through her without a sound. And then, when he was finished, he dipped his sweet dark face down into the sweet dark mouth, mouth to mouth, she would never forget. She bought the cuffs and ran all the way home, dreaming of their new forgiveness.

Five-twenty now, and she was hot all over. Soon I’ll be sweating, she thought. Her wrists twisted loosely inside their cuffs. She felt the tingle between her belly and her spine. Almost by accident she noticed the buzzing voices and shifting images of the TV. She had forgotten it, so busy she was staging herself, trying to decide where to put the keys (between her legs), what position her legs should be in, throwing them around to find an alluring pose. But now she realized she’d left it on the twenty-four-hour news channel. It’s fine, she thought. Something mindless to distract from the waiting.

She had to hold her head a little to the side, peer around the bedposts, but she could make out what was going on. What was going on was war. Which war was difficult to say—the sound was barely audible, so she only had images to go by—but it was a wintry place, close-up shots of soldiers showing icicled mustaches and beards. The men looked pale blue and dirty and tired, more tired than she could imagine. Some of the faces were talking to the camera, and though she couldn’t hear any words, she could see their beaten faces, resigned to something beyond sight. A village peppered with bodies, bloody snow. A dog sniffing at potatoes spilled from a bag clutched by a bulky bundled woman, her head shrouded in a flower-printed scarf. All perfectly dead, fallen where shot, knee-deep in snow in the middle of their lives.

Whatever war it was, it soon gave way to panels of heads and mouths and waves of commentary. The mediascape of winners and losers and statistics, of men and women in suits, as if their pin-straight hair had wiped this week’s war off the screen.

She closed her eyes and bit the inside of her cheek, because it was 5:40 and he wasn’t home yet and she suddenly realized she was freezing.

She looked up at the ceiling, down to her nipples standing up against the cold, over to the window now black with night, but the TV kept pulling like a hungry child. Five-fifty and she had to concentrate, had to distract her imagination to keep it from slipping into the nasty mind-wander of paranoia when your lover is not in the doorway. Now a tingling in her flesh: Was her own skin trying to tell her something? She jerked her wrists in a kind of death rattle against the slow fear crawling up her spine. He’s stopping to buy a bottle of wine, a rosé. He’s getting cash to take her to dinner. He missed the first train, he ran into a heavy crowd, the sky opened up and thickened the air, everyone outside is walking in slow motion.

By six she was really cold, and the shivering was taking all her energy so that her brain wouldn’t work right. It kept stuttering and lurching, and out of frustration she went back to the TV. But the TV hadn’t changed at all, it was the same news, or different news with the same faces, as if all over the world the news had the same actors: gaunt, icy faces, bulky women falling into death, sniffing dogs, eyes that were always black, buildings blasted beyond architecture. Why hadn’t the news changed since she last looked? Who were these actors in wars that never ended? She grew agitated over the repeating images, until she finally decided she would stare at the set until they changed. There must be sports news, after all. Or bad weather. Weather always changed the picture.

But they just kept coming and coming, six-fifteen, six-thirty, and when she finally closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to shut them out, she realized she was shivering. At seven she wept, slowly at first, but by seven-thirty she had snot running down her trough and all around her mouth. She was saying his name in low, whimpery wails, she was losing the feeling in her arms, her fingertips were prickling, she was quivering and hiccupping and shutting her eyes from the TV, the awful twenty-four hours of news, the news and the cold and the cuffs and the loss of circulation and the waiting that could be the rest of her out-of-control life. And he kept on not coming home, and if he didn’t, then what?