Chapter 11
I’m trying to save your stupid fucking life.
Has Henry undergone a religious conversion?
Is he participating in some sort of twelve-step program for whatever it is we used to engage in?
We weren’t even that hardcore. It wasn’t like we had leather masks and ball gags and electromagnetic wands and safe words and consent.
No. Ew. Would you look at us? We didn’t need all the bells and whistles.
There is a flash in my peripheral vision, and I sit up to see Henry has left the main house, that he’s walking down the dock and freeing the side of the boat from the spring line.
He hops in, twists open the ventilation cap, and submerges the motor.
Yes, I remember this now. I watch him closely as he loops the lanyard attached to the kill switch over his wrist, squeezes the primer bulb to get gas into the motor, and shifts the gearshift into neutral.
He drifts through the water with the choke on, then starts the ignition.
He is wearing a salt-stained denim hat and a fleece vest over a light-gray crewneck sweatshirt, and I know his huge dick is snug against his leg.
I would still let him annihilate me if he tried, like a feminist fucking scab.
I limp around the room and study the walls, the places where all the fish paintings have been removed so that I cannot take out Henry’s eye with the corner of a frame.
I’m checking to see if I can find an impression of a cross somewhere.
His wife has that Catholic look about her. Maybe she got to him.
I brush my hair again for something to do. I hit a bad tangle and I’m working at it, gingerly, when the little plastic bristles separate from the brush pad and go tinkling all over the bathroom floor. I roar in a way that matches my angry sea monster hair.
Henry leaves me overnight, with no water and no food.
I can handle hunger, and toxic diet culture is, by nature, toxic, an absorption of nasty chemical solvents with chronic effects, so I can find the upside to the hollowness between my hip bones.
But I really start to panic when I turn the bathroom faucet on and manage only a mouthful before the stream slows to a drip.
Henry turned the water off. He turned the fucking water off.
It rains that night, in a nice, soothing way, the branches of the trees caressing the windowpanes, a steady pattering on the gable roof.
I am certain Henry has left me to die, that if he really wanted to punish me, this is exactly how he’d do it.
Anything else would feel too passionate.
Thumbs in the soft tissues of my neck, a knife splitting my flesh.
He wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of liking it a little.
I am approaching twenty-four hours without water.
My ankle is throbbing with hammy effect, and my head is on a wild ride through the failures of titration.
I am heartened to find that the most comfortable position is the one I favor anyway: lying flat on my stomach, head turned to the side, leg pulled up along my torso.
It’s called the crab position, and my husband has used it to justify his behavior.
You sleep all pointy, he says, like you don’t even want me to touch you.
I have a tortured, broken sleep, and when the door opens in the morning, Henry on the other side holding a liter of Smartwater, I openly sob. He comes over and stands above me, the water bottle perspiring lavishly, and I already know before I reach for it that he will jerk it away.
“Beg,” he says.
“Please,” I beg.
“You know what I mean.”
“Henry, please—”
He turns to go.
“Okay!” I shout. I peel back the covers, scooch to the edge.
I flatten my palms on the bed, push myself to a flamingo’s stand.
From here, I have to think about it a moment.
My ankle is swollen and unstable. I grip the quilt behind me, lower myself into a deep, left-legged lunge until I am on one knee, then the other.
Tentatively, I look up at him. He’s waiting with affected nonchalance, a few steps over by the door.
I crawl on all fours, fitting my hands and kneecaps into all my old grooves in the red plaid carpet, feeling and seeing and hearing everything in Technicolor.
The way Henry holds his chin high, watching me with lowered eyes until I arrive at his feet, his face glassed over with imperial claim.
The cushion of the carpet beneath my knees, the little involuntary muscle twitches of Henry’s long toes, the rooted heaviness of his calves and thighs.
I am thinking about the story of Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’s feet with her hair.
I went to Catholic grade school, and when we got to this story in the Bible, I had to excuse myself to the restroom, where I silently masturbated.
I assumed all the girls in my class found the imagery erotic, the way we all agreed Justin Timberlake was the hot one.
But I was socially ostracized after admitting to it at a sleepover.
Since the fifth grade, I’ve known I was different enough to start masking who I was.
It was only ever in these moments, bowing before Henry, that I knew I found my congregation, my faith.
I rise up on my knees, wrap my arms around him, press my cheek to his thighs. “Please, Henry.” I make myself cry for a little bit, until he feels my tears on his skin, through his jeans.
“Look at me,” he says, oh so gently.
I lift my chin until my neck is exposed, open my mouth. Henry unscrews the cap, traces my dry mouth with the wet mouth of the bottle. I lick my lips, whimper.
“What do I get for this?”
My pulse is pounding between my legs. What. Is. This. “Anything you want.”
Henry is looking down at me with a warm and doting expression.
He has crow’s-feet now, freckles in the same pattern over the bridge of his nose.
When I knew him, he looked like a rich kid you wanted to punch in the mouth.
If he came to LA, if he left the boat shoes behind, twenty-five-year-old Instagram models with big shiny lips would throw themselves at him. I might not stand a chance.
He says, “I want you to have dinner with me and be normal. Drink wine. Talk to me.”
I nod desperately. “Yes. Okay. I’d like that.”
“Don’t fucking do that either.” That, patronize him.
I sit back on my heels and admit, “I think about this room more than I should.”
Henry holds my eye a long moment, finds me sincere, though he has no idea how much. He nods. Okay. He motions—chin up again. Then he tips water into my mouth, a capful at a time, until the bottle is empty.
He brings me clean clothes—a worn linen button-down, a six-pack of underwear, a cozy old fleece zip-up. I get moisturizer too, lip balm, Kiehl’s shampoo and conditioner, which I just know he believes is the height of nouveau riche luxury, plus a hair tie. He has always liked me with my hair up.
He comes to let me out around six, and I follow him across the stone path. He holds open the door to the main house like it is a restaurant and we are there to celebrate our wedding anniversary.
A bottle of red wine breathes in a glass decanter on the kitchen counter, next to a pair of raw steaks, seasoned with salt, pepper, and fresh rosemary. I rarely eat red meat, and when I was with Henry, I was a dedicated vegetarian.
“You need iron, Faye,” he says, offering me a glass of wine. “You’re so pale I barely recognized you.”
“I stopped going into the sun a long time ago.”
He has cut up some cheese and fruit to snack on while he cooks, and I make a gouda and apple sandwich.
“You look so pretty with a tan.” He turns on the gas dial, strikes a match.
“I wouldn’t look pretty at all if I still lay out.”
“You look incredible,” he says sadly, his back to me.
“Oh,” I say, uncomfortable by his easy display of sincerity. “Thank you.”
Henry uses tongs to transfer the fillets into the old copper pan, and we listen to the popping and hissing, inhale the scent of fat and char. I am hungry enough to be hungry for steak.
“Last night,” he says, checking the minute hand on his grandfather’s military trench watch, “a tree came down on a power line and the road was closed while they removed it. I wasn’t punishing you.”
“You turned the water off,” I remind him.
“I had to repair something and I guess I forgot to turn it back on. It wasn’t intentional, and nothing went out online that would put you at risk.
I was actually worried about you, out here all alone.
Especially since”—he brings his watch under his nose, watches it tick—“well, never mind.” He flips the steaks.
“Especially since what?”
“You’re afraid of everything.”
“There’s a pill for that. It’s called Lexapro. If you’re so worried about me, you can let me have my medication.”
“I know all about Lexapro,” Henry says curtly.
I stare at him, wondering if I heard him right. “You do?”
Henry lifts a corner of the steak with the tongs, checking the color at the edges. “Go sit down. Dinner will be ready soon.”
I make my way over to the table, double-checking that the brass hook next to the side door is still the place Henry hangs the boat keys.
Henry tents the steaks with tinfoil. He sweeps a bunch of broccolini into the same pan, tosses it in the fat and the oil, adds a squeeze of lemon.
I realize I am forgetting to drink, and I take two large gulps, so that when Henry comes over it will have looked like I am relaxing and enjoying myself.
Henry cuts up our steak and vegetables on the counter, then carries over our plates. I’m allowed an adult fork. “I cooked them a minute longer than I usually would,” he says as he sits down across from me. “Bloody might be a little too much to ask of you.”
“Never,” I tell him, and our eyes catch. Weapons down. We are us again.
“How much closer are we?” I ask him. “To being done here.”
He turns his eyes down. Spears a bite of steak. “Let’s not talk about all that.”
“What do you want to talk about, then?”