Chapter 21 #3
I glance at the bedroom door, my cheeks flaming.
“Because I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.
Last night was easy. Last night my hands were literally tied.
But the person I was when we were together, I don’t recognize her anymore.
I don’t really remember how we used to do things, just that it was good, and I’m scared it’s not going to be good now, because I feel like such a freak and I’ve…
given up.” I lift a hand. What more is there to say?
I don’t know why people call it an unburdening.
Nothing about me feels lighter for saying this.
I want to weep from the exhaustion of carrying something so huge and shameful, which now feels close to colossal for putting words to it.
Before, it was merely a free-floating abstraction of unhappiness I could bat away like a bad odor while I barked at people about the lens I wanted, to kick up the audio in the edit room.
Not that actor, I got to write back to my casting director, I don’t believe he’s ever really struggled in his life, find me someone with yellow teeth and acne scars, someone I buy.
I did an all right job of fashioning a way to say what I want and get it, to tunnel around the truth: I’m still in here. I cannot be deleted.
“It would be so easy,” Henry says in his posh, appealing voice, “for me to make it easy for you.”
My stomach contracts, hot and tight. I reach for my water, drain what’s left, then roll the empty glass around in my hands for something to do.
“Do you want me to?”
I stare at my glass, give an almost imperceptible nod. Outside, the sky pulses with heat lightning, the kind they say is not dangerous.
Henry does not move, but his voice changes like he’s risen to his full and towering height. “I didn’t like it when you told him you missed him today.”
I sit very still and think about my answer. “If I didn’t say it back,” I say, and I can hear how nervous I am in my quaky prepubescent voice, “he would have been suspicious.”
Henry’s face is stone. “I didn’t like it, Faye.”
More harmless lightning, revealing the empty black stage of the lake.
“I can’t imagine it was easy for you to hear,” I submit. “I’m sorry.”
Henry puckers his lips in a show of consideration, sliding his plate back and forth on the table with his wounded index finger, a big cat toying with its prey. “What if I said that’s not good enough?”
I raise my chin, hold Henry’s eye, force myself to withstand the discomfort. Sometimes, I think that it is these moments, the ones between the moments he tells me what to do, that I miss the most.
Henry nudges the plate in my direction. “I’d like you to clean up now.”
I am weightless and warm as I gather our dishes and carry them to the sink. I turn on the faucet, squeeze a generic brand of blue dish soap into a sponge, an everyday domestic act turned tightwire act under the tension of Henry’s storm-blue stare.
I dry the plates. Open a cabinet door, return them to their stack. A light, irregular rain begins to streak the windows, and then thunder cracks so near it feels like an unruly child has shaken our little snow globe, rattling the miniaturized scene of us.
“There are crumbs on the table,” Henry says.
I tug the dish towel off its hook.
Henry flicks his hand. No need for that. “You can use your mouth.”
I fold the dish towel silently, my hands shaking, and return it to its hook with the borders lined up neatly. I approach Henry, aware that I am retracing an old, sacred path. Lust rises in the back of my throat like bile.
With one foot, Henry slides a chair out of the way and angles his own so that he is sitting perpendicular to the table, creating a small space just big enough for me to slip inside.
Our bodies brush—my outer thigh, his inner—and then, impossibly, I am bending over the edge of the table and crumbs are adhering to my tongue like a lint roller.
Henry puts an elbow on the table and rests his temple on his fist, watching me with that combination of contempt and fascination that has always been my undoing.
He takes the tail of my light-colored shirt and passes it between my legs, exhaling long and slow when it comes away wet.
He fingers the damp fabric with a low, incredulous laugh. “I haven’t even touched you yet.”
I rest one cheek on the table, look up at him with all my stupid, embarrassing need. His nostrils flare once, like he might cry.
“Okay,” he says, because he has always been inside my head, hearing and understanding everything. “Okay,” he says again.
He stands, placing the wide sprawl of his fingertips on the small of my back. I hear the clang of metal hitting metal, leather rustling belt loops. Henry slips his big toe under my instep and nudges. Wider. He wants my legs wider.
For a while, he strikes me in silence. I imagine his face, his grim concentration as he waits for one of us to break and say I’ve had enough. But nothing he’s done to me has ever felt like enough.
“Say you’re sorry, Faye.” Henry’s voice is tight with anger and yet in it I hear the heartbreak he is asking me to soothe.