Sheckley, Alyssa - The Better to Hold You.html Read online

  Which didn't prove a thing: Most people seemed to figure that out on their own.

  At first I couldn't understand what the good-looking guy in the fisherman's sweater was doing. He kept looking at me with a frown on his Heathcliffian face, and then checking his watch. I had lost one of my contact lenses and was wearing the blue eyeglass frames my mother thought brought out the color of my eyes. It didn't: My eyes are gray. I figured Heathcliff wanted my seat on the little couch by the window. Or possibly he was waiting for a computer terminal and just happened to be looking at me while he scowled.

  When he came over and dropped a note in my book, I looked up into that brooding face and thought, He must need help with chemistry. I unfolded the little strip of paper. It read: Aaggh Midterms Aggh Agggh. Want to go for a cup of coffee at the Student Center?

  It was only my certainty that I was a momentary distraction, my utter conviction that no man that handsome would ever be seriously interested in me, that made me appear indifferent. After “Midterms Aggh” I wrote an exclamation point. Then I added, Not yet, must finish chapter. Heathcliff stood next to me, reading my edits as I wrote them.

  —In an hour? He wrote.

  —Sure. I was sure: Sure he'd be gone by then. But he waited the hour, glancing up at me from time to time, and I had lost all semblance of concentration by the time the big clock on the wall struck six.

  “Ready?” There he stood, regarding me with a look that was equal parts admiration and bemusement. I felt that he was surprising himself by asking me out. I was so tense that it required a conscious effort not to twitch, blink repeatedly, or keep nodding. As we walked to the Student Center, I listened intently while Hunter told me about his major, his irritating house mates, his plans after graduation, and his dietary peculiarities.

  It turned out that Hunter despised cheese. He called it “the corpse of milk,” quoting James Joyce. I joked that we would be a terrible couple to invite for dinner, as I was a vegetarian and basically lived on cheese. This sounded as though I assumed he would want to see me again: I burned with humiliation.

  “Why are you a vegetarian?” Hunter and I had compromised on a meal of coffee and french fries. All around us, it seemed, thinner, prettier girls in tight black turtlenecks and perfectly tattered Levi's were drinking cappuccinos and reading annotated copies of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Only one of them wore glasses, the fake little black kind models wear when they want to look intellectual.

  “I don't like the idea of supporting the meat industry.” I was wearing a navy sweat suit, and my hair was unwashed and rolled into a messy bun on the top of my head.

  “All those poor little battery-raised chickens without beaks? All those innocent little overfed veal calves with ulcers on their eyes and hooves too soft to stand on?” Hunter ate another french fry.

  “I see you've dated vegetarians before.” Before! As if this were a real date!

  But Hunter only laughed. He had brown wavy hair that curled at the ends and wonderful dark eyes that sort of drank you in. He sat like an athlete, muscular thighs spread wide; later, I found out that he played soccer for the school team. When he took off his sweater I could see the shadow of his pectoral muscles through his thin white T-shirt. “Hey,” he said, “can I ask a personal question?”

  “Sure,” I replied, trying to hide my nervous ness.

  “How long is your hair when it's down?”

  This is where I was supposed to pull out the pins and dazzle him. “To the small of my back. But it's not too clean right now.”

  Hunter leaned back and took a swallow of coffee. “I need a cigarette,” he said. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

  He wants to sleep with me, I thought, but by dawn he'll be back in what ever hellish frat house he lives in and I'll never hear from him again.

  “I have to get back to the fishbowl.” Which was what we all called the Science Library.

  “Bloody midterms.” I later learned that his family had moved to En gland when he was sixteen. Hunter had managed to retain a sort of Ralph Lauren patina of upper-middle Britishness, which was to grow even more pronounced after we moved to Manhattan.

  Outside, on the badly lit path back to the library, Hunter stopped and gripped me by the elbows. I was dizzy with the smell of him, masculine and Marlboro-tinged, with a hint of verbena soap. “Abra. Are you at all interested in seeing me again, or am I just bugging the hell out of you?”

  I wanted to sink my teeth into his lower lip and kiss him till there was blood. I wanted to sink down to my knees and bite him right through his jeans. Shaken by the violence of this lust, I took a moment to answer. “Interested,” I said.

  “Good.” A grin flashed over his heavily shadowed face like a light going on. Then he lit a cigarette and became moody and unknowable again. What do you see in me, I wanted to ask. Is it the hair? Do you have a thing for virgins? Months later, I finally worked up the courage to ask him what first attracted him to me.

  “Your confidence,” he said. “The way you just sat there in your comfortable clothes, completely consumed by your work. The way you didn't seem to need to check your watch like all the other poor slobs putting in their study time. With your hair up, and those goofy big eighties glasses, you seemed … I don't know. Like a little nun, perfectly at peace with herself.”

  When he finally made love to me, two weeks after our first encounter, I was so unused to being touched that I kept laughing. I was so sexually inexperienced that all my erogenous zones were ticklish. I wanted to beg Hunter to be rougher with me, but he was desperately considerate. I'd ridden too many horses as a girl to bleed when he entered me, but there was a little pain as he stretched me.

  I wanted to follow that pain wherever it would take me, but Hunter held himself back until the end, and by then there wasn't enough time to catch up.

  “You okay, ‘Cadabra girl?”

  “Mm,” I said, secure in his arms. After he fell asleep I touched myself between my slippery legs and conjured images stolen from my mother's old movies: the pretty young witch, writhing in sensual panic with her wrists tied to a stake, as Satan moves in, glistening with red makeup.

  The magazines all tell you to be open and frank about what you want in bed, but this presumes a deeper confidence. I never felt completely certain of what Hunter loved in me. All I had to go by was his image of a young woman as self-possessed as a little nun.

  My mother used to say that she hoped the sex was good, as he was likely to treat me like crap in the near future. Which was why I couldn't bring myself to ask her about the slave girl business now, even though I was dying to know: Did this mean Hunter was suddenly seeing me differently?

  Or did it mean he wasn't seeing me at all?

  SIX

  Eventually, I had to admit that there was something wrong. But it took me a while. Touch-drunk from all the unaccustomed contact, I found myself able to fall asleep and stay that way for the first time since early adolescence. Forget sleeping pills; I'd discovered the real cure for insomnia—sex-induced coma.

  Hunter started joking that it was usually the man who got tired out after making love. But I wasn't so much physically exhausted as emotionally satiated. For once in my life, my brain didn't kick into fretting mode the moment I lay down and closed my eyes. It was almost as though Hunter was taking me over by taking control—or maybe I was just learning to surrender.

  But gradually, I became aware that there was no one sleeping beside me. Hunter's side of the bed was always empty when I went to sleep and unrumpled when I woke up. I saw signs of late-night feasting in the kitchen—dirty plates piled high in the sink, cardboard take-out containers in the garbage that hadn't been there the night before. For years, Hunter and I had agreed that he wouldn't bring meat into the apartment, but now he was binging after midnight on spare ribs and meatball grinders. To my sensitive nose, there was a faint, per sis-tent smell of dead flesh in our apartment, and even leaving the windows wide open didn't eradicate it. When I complained, Hu
nter laughed and said he'd have to remember to leave the garbage outside our front door.

  He didn't apologize for breaking our agreement, and I didn't call him on it. I also didn't ask him why he was suddenly less fastidious about his person, and mine. He no longer avoided making love to me when I had my period—in fact, he reveled in the slippery, transgressive feel of it. While I had to admit that I liked this aspect of his newfound earthiness, I was less thrilled with his new habit of showering only every two or three days. His shaving became erratic as well, and my husband's dark stubble left red, raw marks on my face and inner thighs.

  At night, I began to have vivid dreams that I could never quite remember. I knew when I first woke up that I had been in the midst of some complex drama, but all the details bled away as I came fully awake. I had vague impressions, though. A night sky in the country, brilliant with stars, the moon a huge, glowing orb until a dark cloud passed over it. My husband, pressing me down on the bed as I whimpered in fear. Malachy in his white lab coat, holding up a half-dead cat and instructing Sam, Lilliana, and Ofer that they were going to have to learn how to kill things. “Start small,” Malachy said, “with something wounded, like this fellow. Then keep challenging yourself. Go for something bigger. Work together to bring it down.” I raised my hand, asking: What about me?

  “You're the bigger prey, of course,” Malachy explained, and everyone looked at me with renewed interest: Ah, yes, now we see it.

  My inner life, I was discovering, was basically a B movie. Wouldn't my mother be proud.

  Then, after a week of this, I had a dream that felt different from the others. I was back in the subway train. Pressed up against strangers, I could feel someone rubbing slowly against me. In real life, I would have been horrified and repulsed, but in this dream, the subtle touch against my back and bottom felt like waves lapping up against me, sensual and impersonal, anonymous and erotic. A male hand gripped my waist, and I thought, This is like that story by Anaïs Nin, about the woman and the stranger on the train, and I gave myself up to the illicit plea sure of it. As the stranger moved in sinuous motions against my backside, I felt my thoughts drifting to this faceless man, and then, without warning, I was that man, struggling to hold myself in check and to restrict myself to just this small necessary contact. I could feel my breathing quicken; I was losing control. And then I was back in my own body. I looked up and saw a barn owl perched on the handrail, swiveling its head a disconcerting 180 degrees to give me a long, slow wink. I realized that the man touching me wasn't a stranger—well, not a complete stranger, at any rate.

  “Stop,” I said, trying to break free from his embrace. It felt as though recognizing him had broken some kind of spell.

  “Hang on, sweetheart, I'm almost done,” came Red's response. He sounded like he'd been running hard.

  “I don't think so,” I said, pushing him away. Behind me, I heard a woman gasp.

  “He's written all over you,” said a woman, lifting my shirt up and peering at my bare back. In the dream's logic, it didn't seem peculiar that his touch had penetrated the fabric of my clothing. It didn't seem strange that I could suddenly see myself from above, my back covered with scarlet designs, like an aboriginal story or a shamanistic spell.

  I came instantly awake, alone in the bed. The bedside clock read three A.M., and it was still completely dark outside. Swinging my feet from the bed, I padded down the hall.

  “Hunter? Are you up?” As I checked the apartment for my husband, I wondered why I was having erotic dreams about a scruffy redneck when the only man I'd ever wanted was finally turning to me the way I'd always hoped he would.

  But Hunter wasn't home, and though I went back to bed and forced myself to remain there, I didn't sleep any more that night. It was only in the morning, when I stepped into the shower, that I noticed the fading red marks on my back. I knew they were simply the imprint of the wrinkled sheets on my skin, but for a moment, in the mirror, they resembled arcane symbols.

  Hunter came home just as I was leaving for work, looking sweaty and disheveled. He had gotten up early, he said, to go running.

  To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it's difficult to get someone to understand something when her marriage depends on her not understanding it. But even I was coming to recognize that a few short weeks after it had begun, my second honeymoon was coming to an end.

  Still, I allowed myself to pretend for a little while longer that I didn't know why it was ending.

  SEVEN

  On Sunday, October 7, I ran out of denial time. Because I wasn't working, there was nothing to distract me from the fact of my thirtieth birthday. Like all birthdays that end in zero, this one demanded a certain amount of attention. I was entering the decade in which life decisions carry the most weight. My mother always used to say, In your twenties, you can have a first career and a first marriage that turn out to be nothing but a footnote later on. In your thirties, however, you are making your adult life. You could remake it in your forties, of course, but still, turning thirty was a very big deal.

  Not that I expected Hunter to make a big fuss about the day.

  He had established early on in our relationship that he felt birthday and Christmas presents were for children—grown-ups surprised each other by commemorating more inventive, personal dates. Which, to give him credit, he sometimes did—a bouquet of red roses one year to celebrate our first year of shared rent, a pair of silk pan ties the morning after he'd first seen me drunk.

  But birthdays, even pivotal, painful ones, Hunter tended to forget. If you don't need to buy a gift, you don't mark it on your calendar—as simple as that. I suppose, if I'd asked him out to the movies, he would have taken me. But it just seemed a bit pathetic, somehow, like calling in a special favor. Far better to just let things slide by.

  I thought I had come to terms with the absence of any special anniversarial treatment—or, as Hunter would call it, any false emotion. So maybe it was just my imagination that he seemed particularly dour that morning. He was preoccupied as he stood by the fussily percolating coffeepot and short-tempered when I asked him if he wanted toast, so I didn't bother to suggest an afternoon movie. Clearly, he was intending to spend this day as he had all the others since his return: searching the Internet for obscure books and articles on wolves, or interviewing Canadians as he worked on his seemingly endless article.

  I'm not sure what the deal was with Canada—I guess they just have more wolf people there to interview.

  My mother called to wish me happy birthday and asked me to take the train to see her so she could give me her gift in person. She knew about Hunter and his birthday theories, because in a weak moment I had complained about it. And if there is one thing my mother, the former B-movie star, cannot understand, it's putting up with something you don't like.

  “Act like you have top billing or you'll never get it,” she always said. “If I'd slunk around like you do, I'd still be ‘blond vampire girl number three.' “

  But I have watched people's faces as my mother launches into one of her tirades, and I think there may be worse things than slinking around dissatisfied. In any case, I said I would try to visit her next weekend. My father called next and told me he'd sent a check, because he wasn't sure what I needed. He spent a while telling me about his girlfriend's crazy ex-husband, and then told me to come visit soon. He didn't mention Hunter.

  I knew my work friends wouldn't call me, as they would see me tomorrow. I had lost touch with my college and high school friends; funny how you never see that in movies—the heroine always has at least two close childhood friends, each a little fatter or crazier than herself. Sometimes there's a third, a gay man who is smarter, more stylish, and underneath more tragic than the rest. I wished for such sidekicks. I wondered if you could put in a personal ad: Straight woman seeks gay man, straight women, for walks in the park, foreign films, impromptu make overs, well-chosen gifts. No secret competitors, annual migrators, or disappearing acts need apply.

  Or maybe
what I needed was a dog. Dogs don't wake up one morning and realize that the relationship isn't working for them anymore. Dogs don't lie about what they've been doing, or leave you to go explore other options. Like their wolfish cousins, dogs love for life.

  Feeling maudlin, I decided to go for a long walk by the boat basin in Riverside Park, to get my endorphins flowing and work the wobble out of my thighs.

  “I'm going out,” I told Hunter.

  “Aah,” he replied, looking briefly in my general direction. Once out the door, I found it hard to move my legs very quickly. I contemplated taking a bus to the park, but then convinced myself that the urge to move would take hold once I got my feet near some grass.

  A few runners passed me on Riverside Drive, looking lean and serious in skintight Lycra while I churned along in my gray sweat suit. A businessman with a plastic bag on his left hand waited for his mastiff to defecate. It's moments like these that make me love the city so much: Nowhere else is the natural made to seem so unnatural.

  On Seventy-ninth I met a woman I'd gone to high school with in the suburbs. She told me she was writing plays and designing software. She had perfect toes in strappy sandals, and her stomach bulged with chic, designer-sweatered pregnancy.

  “Are you married?” she asked me, not waiting for a reply. “I just married a lovely man from a small village in Italy. I can't tell you how happy we are. We got married in the little white church where Paolo was christened and the whole town turned out, all the young girls wearing ribbons. I remember you used to say you weren't going to get married. I always imagined you'd wind up in a big, funky apartment with a lot of cats.”