Death 5 Rape （Marriage） #26
Carmelo was given the key to room 6, which was on the second floor.
As Stella followed her husband up the staircase, a roil of nausea swelled in her stomach.
Her situation wasn’t any different from that of any other woman going to any other hotel—no more subtle or mysterious than any whore’s.
Right now, everyone she knew—all the men she had ever rejected, all the women who had ever called her stuck-up—was imagining her checking into this hotel so she could have the job done to her.
She imagined them imagining her indignity, how in that moment when Carmelo put his dirty end in her, she would have to think about the paesan’s collective amusement.
Her breath came in shallow, grasping whuffs by the time they got to 6.
Carmelo turned to her at the door. He had probably been lost in his own sexual reverie, for all she knew, anticipating the consummation of his four-year courtship.
There was concern on his still-smiling face. “Are you all right?”
Compulsively she waved off his arm. “Just lady troubles.” That might mean anything to him—it had just popped into her head, but it could buy her some time.
The room would have seemed enormous if there had been any focal point in it besides the bed, which was fat with duvet and piled in red and gold pillows.
The fabric on the pillows shone slightly.
Strangers had drooled on those shining pillows, Stella realized.
How could the hotel people clean shiny fabric like that?
Carmela had sent a bouquet of white roses; they were waiting on the polished black dresser with a stiff gray card that said Congratulations Stella she felt guilty about the hotel’s water bill.
Tucking her gloves into her handbag, she sat down on the lowered toilet lid and stared at the dirt patterns her heels had left on the white tile floor.
She was sweating from the climb up the stairs, but when she thought about undoing the buttons on her coat, she ruled it out.
There was too much bed on the other side of the door for her to take off any of her clothes.
All right. All right. Now what are you going to do?
She was on her honeymoon. She had avoided a wedding night encounter by virtue of their travel arrangements, but every hour was borrowed time.
It was going to happen, there didn’t seem to be a reasonable possibility that she could avoid it anymore.
She would endure the violation of her most private places, the bestial reduction of labor and childbirth, the tearing and stretching, maybe even death.
The thought sprouted unhelpfully in her mind, like clover in a stone wall, that she had misjudged Joey, that she finally understood why he had shot himself rather than offer his body up to circumstances beyond his control.
Was she just going to let it happen? Let her whole life be the choices other people made for her?
But she had never made a choice for herself—that had been her mistake.
She’d never known what it was she wanted out of life, only what she didn’t want.
People can’t understand negative convictions.
A man who is willing to die for something is a hero, but a man who is passionately not willing to die for something is a coward.
Maybe that was why no one had listened to her, thought she’d been doing anything but playing hard to get.
She hunched on the toilet in her wrinkled blue travel suit.
A heaviness had settled low in her chest, a weight hanging from the bottom of her heart.
She wondered if this was despair. What was she going to do?
She had spent most of their courtship sitting on the toilet hiding from Carmelo.
She doubted the same strategy would get her through an entire marriage.
STELLA AND CARMELO SPENT THE AFTERNOON walking through the cobblestone streets near the hotel.
They stepped into shops and stopped for pastries.
Stella let Carmelo carry the conversation, and she accepted his arm when he offered it.
It was not a bad feeling, strolling through a pretty city with her hand resting on a good-looking man’s elbow.
But even as she enjoyed herself, Stella suffered a swelling nausea of fear.
Those complacent thoughts were the dangerous ones.
If Stella let herself like a piece of her marriage, she might succumb to the whole thing.
For dinner Carmela and Paolo brought them to a restaurant Tina would have considered “fine dining.” There were pink cloths covering the tables and short candles in glass tumblers.
Carmela took Stella’s hand in her cold one for a long moment—Stella was wearing her gloves, but the cold passed right through them.
“My brother told us you were very beautiful,” Carmela said.
Carmelo touched Stella’s elbow, where her sleeve had creased into a pinch. “Now you see for yourself,” he told his sister.
Paolo summoned the waiter and ordered for the table in French.
They shared several dishes so Stella and Carmelo could sample them: sea mussels cooked in white wine, the giant bones of a cow split and served shimmering with their own marrow, long soft French-fried potatoes.
Stella had never eaten such fancy food. She noticed only after she had gnawed all the meat off a duck bone that Carmela had left hers on the plate, separating the meat from the bone with her knife and fork.
Carmela and Paolo seemed to be kind, solicitous people.
Paolo had a job at the docks, and Carmela was a cleaning woman at a university.
Paolo was a soft-spoken man. He said little throughout the whole meal.
Carmela, who looked so much like her brother, listened intently as Stella answered her questions about her family, about Ievoli, about presents she had received at her shower.
She asked Stella if she needed anything for her kitchen, and Stella smiled sweetly and said, “Oh, I don’t cook, so you had better ask your brother what he needs for the kitchen, instead,” which shocked Carmela into silence.
Carmelo laughed it off ruefully and his sister’s expression lit up in a grin.
“You’re lucky he spent years cooking for all those railroad men,” Carmela told her.
“They made him a great cook. At least twice as good as me.”
For dessert, Carmela ordered a small, soft chocolate cake that was hot on the inside.
The cake, a surprise to Stella, arrived as Paolo was insisting on picking up the check for dinner.
Carmelo fanned colorful Canadian bills on the tablecloth and made good-natured threats about never coming to visit again if Paolo was always going to pay for things.
Meanwhile, the cake sat primly under its orange peel garnish, giving off a cakey aroma.
Stella had eaten so much she had begun to feel turmoil in her gut, but Carmela insisted Stella try it. “Just one bite. Just one forchetta.”
“Not forchetta,” Carmelo interrupted. “That’s Italian. We have to learn Calabrese now, Carmela.” He winked at Stella. “You have to say, ‘Na bròcc.’”
The light from the table candles rippled in his smile lines, and Stella couldn’t help but think that this man had done more than his twenty-seven years’ worth of smiling.
That was something someone else would have loved about him, but it made her feel sad.
She did not love him, and she never would.
Some other woman would have wanted badly to make him happy.
But he had to be so damn stubborn. The thick chocolate coating her throat made her want to cough.
How stupid Carmelo was, forcing them into this arrangement that would make them both unhappy.
The good news about that heavy chocolate cake was that it settled so poorly in Stella’s stomach that when she and Carmelo got back to the hotel room she was able to make herself vomit.
On this occasion she left the bathroom door open, so Carmelo might see the veracity of her indisposition.
It was a shame flushing away that duck and those beautiful potatoes.
But she’d saved her virginity for one more night.
She slept in her blue suit again, not even taking off her stockings or jacket.
MONTREAL WAS LOVELY the first week of October, the leaves at the peak of their autumnal change.
Chilly breezes cut through the stone facades so that Stella never felt overwarm in her thick new coat.
As the hours ticked by, Stella’s anxiety accumulated, gradually but inexorably, like sand in the bottom of an hourglass. Eventually she would run out of time.