Chapter 6 #4
Henry’s fingers relax, then still altogether.
He goes to reach for a piece of my hair that has come untucked from behind my ear; then, to my immense disappointment, he seems to lose his nerve.
Is this one of those dreams, those nightmares I have about him?
Where we get so close to being together again, and then we are thwarted, somehow, by some impropable dream turn.
“So you thought you would, what?” Henry is smiling now, but there is a kind of venom in it. “Come here and flaunt your shit?”
I blink at him, dumbfounded. “My shit?”
He draws his eyes up and down my body. “Your fancy clothes. Your tacky watch. Your fucking face and whatever you’re doing to it to still look like that.
” He looks away from me when he says that part, swallows hard, like he regrets giving me anything even bordering a compliment.
Then he turns back, leans in closer, staring at me with unmitigated hatred.
My pulse should be pounding with panic. This is wrong. All wrong. But I feel nothing.
“You couldn’t wait to come here and try it out from my side,” he says, alarmingly calm.
“From your side?” I repeat, feeling dimmer than I’d like.
“You think you’re the one with the power now.”
Though I am excessively tired, I can’t help but antagonize him with a smile. “Didn’t I always have it?”
“Because I was in love with you.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t need to. Henry’s eyes redden with rage.
“I do not love you anymore,” he informs me callously.
“I should hope not,” I say, doing my best to mask my disappointment.
Henry looks past my shoulder, trancelike. “I did, though. And then you just… massacred me in front of the world. How you said it went down between us—that is not what fucking happened, Faye.”
A flare of fear, somewhere deep within the wilderness of me, barely seen, barely felt.
I am aware enough still to know I should be afraid, even if I cannot access the feeling.
I expected Henry to be angry. I expected that to convert into something tawdry and memorable between us.
But Henry is not angry, I’m realizing. Henry is humiliated.
A humiliated man is sometimes the last thing a woman sees.
How had I failed to discern the difference before I let him in here, before I allowed him to mix me a drink?
There is so much I could say to defend myself, if only Henry hadn’t so obviously drugged me.
“That is what happened,” I manage. But when I try to remember the details of it all, I find I cannot.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Henry says, and for some inexplicable reason, his voice is choked with emotion.
It is an effort to focus on him. My left eyelid feels heavier than my right. There are surgeries to fix that, I think. “Why apologize to me, then?”
Henry purses his perfect lips in victory. “How else was I going to get you to let me in here?”
A warm, hazy feeling overtakes me. I could fall asleep, right here, listening to Henry tell me what a terrible person I am.
The delicious dreams I would have. I’d never want to wake up.
“You put something in my drink,” I say, but it comes out rearranged and all wrong.
Put my drink in your something. Or something. Something…
“I didn’t think it would be this easy.” Henry exhales, almost disappointed. “I didn’t think you would make it this easy for me.”
I put my lips together and try very hard to produce a word, any word.
Henry props his elbow on the back of the couch, and with his thumb he strokes his rosy bottom lip, watching me begin to nod off with clinical fascination.
My phone is balanced in the seam of the couch cushions, tipped up slightly, so that when it begins to rattle, I can see it’s my assistant, texting that she got my message and she will cancel my week for me, no problem.
“Are you going to write her back?” Henry asks. He’s sincerely asking. He does not do anything to impede my efforts, but the problem is I am not making any. Just before the screen darkens, Henry taps the message. And then he’s in my phone, my world, my life that he so flagrantly despises.
“Let’s see,” Henry says to himself, trampling through my beautiful digital gardens with his big bully thumbs.
At last I muster up the strength to make a grab for what’s mine, but Henry catches my hand and places it in my lap and gives the top of it a kindly little pat.
Valiant effort, Faye. My left eyelid seals completely shut.
“That’s not very pretty,” Henry says. He uses his thumb to drag my other eyelid down to match.
I think of what I must look like, sitting there with my eyes closed and fish lips smacking, and I realize that must not look very pretty either, and despite what’s happening—what is happening?
—I still want to look pretty for Henry. I rest my cheek on the back of the couch, and my body sinks, expands, forgets its own solidness.
“I’ve waited a long time for this,” Henry says from somewhere in the dark. His hand moves to cover my mouth, like I am screaming. But why would I be screaming? I’ve been waiting a long time for this too.
A minute or maybe the rest of my life passes, and then a prick of consciousness.
There is knocking at the door, and Henry has gone to answer it.
He is speaking to someone in an easy way, telling them that everything is fine and, no, we don’t need anything and, yes, have a nice evening too.
I’m picturing the manager with the teased hair, maybe the young guy in the cargo pants who carried my bags up the stairs when I first arrived.
Help, I cannot say.