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

  “No,” I said slowly, “that's my mother. I prefer dogs.”

  Mrs. Small Village in Italy threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, that's what I remember about you, Abra. Your killer sense of humor. Let's get together for dinner sometime soon. Here's my number.”

  I stuffed her card into a pocket and continued walking, passing young lovers in faded jeans, laughing and talking animatedly, their faces turned to each other.

  On the way back, I shopped for dinner at the health food store, where I saw a woman in her fifties with stark black hair and oversized tinted glasses. She looked familiar, but I couldn't place her until she ran up and hugged me, explaining that she was my father's old girlfriend Rita, and she hadn't seen me since I'd been in college, and how was the old man.

  “He's doing all right.”

  “Is he with someone? He's always got to be with someone, your father.”

  “He's with someone.”

  She shook her head. “I just have no respect for people who have to be in a relationship at any cost.”

  Rita embraced me again, enveloping me in strong perfume. She gave me her card in case I needed a job or some public relations, and then she finally left me free to examine the onions.

  The problem with Manhattan is, everyone comes here eventually—all your old friends, enemies, lovers, demons. People you met on vacation in Nepal will wind up beating you out for a taxi. The bully who called you “Dog Breath” all through first grade will turn up at your local diner, and will remember you didn't come to his sixth birthday party, which is where the whole trouble began. Don't come to the big city to become anonymous. New York is like Oz: The Wicked Witch of the West turns out to be the lady who didn't like your dog back in Kansas.

  Back in the safety of my own apartment, with no one to remind me of my failings as a human and as a wife, I prepared dinner while Hunter remained focused on what ever he was writing. Because of the roiling uneasiness building inside of me, I chopped and mixed and measured with more care than usual, the way I did back in high school when I was first teaching myself to cook. Our kitchen was really a windowless nook, and from time to time I found myself gazing out into the living room. I tried not to look at the taut, defended posture of Hunter's back as he brooded over his words.

  When there was nothing more to do with the vegetarian chili, I made my way through four sections of The New York Times waiting to see if Hunter would finish up what he was doing, but at three o'clock he was still hard at work, so I decided to take myself off to the bookstore. I returned from Barnes & Noble at seven (having glanced through a few titles in the Help, My Marriage Is Dying section at the exact moment our next-door neighbors strolled by, arm in arm, with books on gardening and Tuscany).

  “Want some wine, Hunter?” I said to the back of his head.

  “Mm.”

  “Red or white?”

  “What ever.”

  “Or should I just put out some blotter acid?”

  “Hah, very funny.”

  “So you are listening.”

  Hunter looked up from his computer, and I was reminded of a dog guarding its bone. “I'm almost done,” he said. “Two more sentences and then I can take a break.”

  You would think, from his tone, that he was closing up after an arduous surgery and I was asking him to leave his patient bleeding on the table. Swallowing my annoyance, I opened up a bottle of Merlot.

  I glanced up when Hunter pushed his chair back from the computer and shambled over to the dinner table, his mind clearly a thousand miles away.

  “Okay, then, I'm here,” he said, reading over a page of notes before laying it on the couch. “What's for dinner?”

  I served him his chili, so intent on concealing any hint of my own hurt and irritation that the first hint I had of Hunter's hurt and irritation was when he shoved his bowl away with such force that it skidded off the table and bounced against the living room wall.

  For a moment, I just stared at the shattered pieces of pottery. Then I looked at my husband over the flame of a thick gold candle. “Mind telling me why you just did that?”

  Hunter gave a long, deflated sigh and then buried his face in his hands. He spoke without looking at me. “I don't ask you to cook, Abra, but if you say you're going to make me chili, then for God's sake serve me something I can eat.”

  “You are aware that I'm a vegetarian?”

  Hunter's head came up, and he stared at me from bloodshot eyes. “Are you aware that I am fucking not? You keep saying how thin and tired I look. How sick I am.” He snarled out the word “sick” like a curse, then gestured sarcastically to my bowl. “Here, babe, build up your strength with a nice, juicy, red tomato. Genetically modified and pesticide-filled, I might add.”

  I remained calm as Hunter got up, fumbled in his jacket pocket, and extracted a cigarette. I'd thought he'd quit over a year ago. On the exposed brick wall, the sauce was dripping slowly onto a woodcut of a hare.

  “Hunter, I don't suppose you feel like telling me what's really bothering you?”

  He dragged his hand through his hair. “It's just all this sitting in the apartment day after day, trying to write about nature. I'm a fucking prisoner of the Upper West Side.”

  “Then why don't you go out more?”

  He paused as if weighing his reply against my stupidity. “Abra, I'm writing about wilderness. And yes, I know I can take a walk in Central Park, but somehow after spending the summer in the Carpathian Mountains, crossing a grid of Gap stores and concrete to get to a sliver of toddler-infested grass is not as exciting as it once was.”

  I looked at him with what he called my nun's face. “So you're tired of living in Manhattan, and you decide to let me know by throwing your dinner at the wall?”

  “I didn't throw it.” Hunter shook a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and inhaled.

  “I'd rather you didn't do that in here.”

  “It tastes like shit anyway.” He ground his Marlboro out on the butter plate.

  “Don't ruin the butter,” I said, “just because you don't like dairy products.”

  “Christ, I've got to get out of this place. I'm dying in here, Abra, can't you see that?”

  The stick of pale yellow butter was coated with dark ash, a crooked spear sticking out of its side. Why did I even care about that now? My hands were shaking, so I let them hold each other. “Get out of here? Do you mean out of the marriage?”

  Hunter examined the palms of his hands as if he could read his own lifeline. “Maybe. I don't know. I need something to change.”

  I felt my face crumple, then got it back under control. “Okay, so something in your life needs to change, and you don't know exactly what it is yet. Okay. If something's bothering you, we need to talk about it. Is it the writing? Or did something happen on the—” He was getting his jacket out of the closet before the word “trip” had left my mouth.

  “I'm sorry, Abs,” he said as he left, “but I just can't do this now.”

  I leaned against the open door for support. “Are you leaving me?”

  “Don't read more into this than there is.”

  Suddenly I wished I had bought one of those self-help books with multiple choices and single answers. Something with a title like The Caveman at Your Table or How Gone Is He? I closed the door quietly and leaned my head against it, listening to the sound of Hunter's footsteps as he bounded down the stairs and out of the building.

  At midnight my husband returned, reeking of cigarette smoke.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out.”

  I was sitting up in bed, wearing my white cotton pajamas and tortoiseshell glasses. The remains of dinner had been cleaned away long ago: I wasn't the sort of woman to leave the tomato on the wall as a kind of unspoken recrimination.

  Especially since Hunter would just leave it there.

  “Out where?”

  “Movie.”

  In the background, I was half aware of the television's still reporting the day
's disasters.

  Hunter threw his clothes off without looking at me and climbed into bed. I was relieved he didn't feel the need to shower: That's one of the first signs of infidelity, according to The Six Signs of Infidelity by Louise Rosegarten. I had discovered this earlier, during my visit to the bookstore. You also had to watch out for a new style of underwear, particularly a switch to bikini briefs. Of course, Hunter already wore bikini briefs. When he wore underwear.

  “Which movie did you see?”

  Hunter tossed a thick lock of brown hair out of his eyes, like a fractious horse. “Womb Raider. Rated triple X. Want to check the times?”

  I didn't flinch. “Yes.”

  Heaving himself dramatically out of bed, Hunter went to the back door and fished the paper out of the recycling pail. He returned to the bedroom, loudly flipping through it till he found the page, then slammed it down on the bed in front of me. We glared at each other until we both started to laugh.

  “You didn't really go to this, did you?”

  He was still laughing. “Why? Did you want to see it with me?”

  The tension lifted, he pulled on his tattered robe before excusing himself and heading into the bathroom. As I waited for my husband to come back to bed, I opened up this week's New Yorker magazine and tried to come up with a caption for a wordless cartoon. There was a couple in a marriage therapist's office, being shown a tank of water. Befuddled, I looked up, startled by the chime that meant the computer was being turned on in the living room.

  “Hunter?”

  No response. For a long moment I just sat in bed, trying to figure out if the monster in the closet was real or a trick of shadows and imagination. Was Hunter really changing toward me, or was he just caught up in some internal drama that had everything to do with his work and nothing to do with me?

  I walked into the living room and watched him. After a while, he turned around.

  “Can't you sleep?”

  “It's my birthday,” I said. I couldn't help it: I was asking for special favors.

  “Is it? Is it? Christ, what's the date?”

  “October seventh.”

  “So it is. God, I'm all messed up with dates since I got back. So what are you now, twenty-nine?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Well, why don't we have an unbirthday dinner tomorrow. I'll bring you orchids and take you someplace absolutely fantastic, where virgins massage the beef before they serve it. We'll stay up atrociously late, go to some smoky blues bar, and tip the piano man to sing ‘Happy Birthday' with extra vibrato.”

  “Tomorrow is Monday. I have to work.”

  Hunter raked his hair back with his hand. “Do you? Of course you do. Aw, baby, I'm sorry. We'll find another night. Friday night? We'll do Friday. It'll be even better. Listen, I'm almost done for to night. Just give me two more minutes and I'll be in. Give you a birthday cuddle.”

  I watched him turn, begin to work, cast an anxious, almost irritated glance over his shoulder when he saw I had not yet moved.

  “Hunter?”

  “What is it, Abs?” He was trying to keep the impatience from his voice, with some success.

  “You were with someone else, weren't you?” As he opened his mouth to respond, I clarified, “Not to night. In Romania.”

  He looked almost relieved, I thought. “In Romania,” he said, and I waited for him to continue. But he just left it there, and I thought about all the ways I could interpret those two words. They could mean, Yes, I was unfaithful in Romania, but now I am here and I am with you. Or, There is so much you don't understand about Romania that I don't know where to begin. On the other hand, they could also mean that, in some very real way, my husband was still in Romania, his whole imagination caught up in the adventure of it.

  But, no, I was trying to analyze this away. I knew what he meant. “Who was it?” My mind raced through the possibilities. Magdalena Ionescu, the chief wolf researcher, had to be in her forties, too old for Hunter. “Was it a girl in a bar? A call girl? Who was it?” I found myself hoping that he'd been with a call girl, something that moments ago would have felt unspeakably disgusting.

  “Listen, Abra—I don't think there's any point in rehashing all the details. It's only going to upset you, and frankly, I don't have the stomach for it. Besides, it's very American, this idea of absolute, uncompromising fidelity, with any deviation punished by an exhaustive cross-examination.” Hunter rummaged on the table for a cigarette. “In any case, sex is really the smallest part of what we have, isn't it?” He lit the cigarette and then said, “For Christ's sake, woman, don't just stand there all doe-eyed. Either slap me or get over it. I don't have patience for this victim act.”

  And then I understood. Not a call girl. Not a random girl in a bar. “Are you in love with her?”

  Hunter took a drag on his cigarette. “I don't know, Abra. Probably not in the way that you mean.”

  At that moment, I think I could have walked straight off the balcony without blinking. Instead, I made myself walk into the bedroom, lay myself down on the bed, and removed my glasses. Turned the light off and tried to sleep, but only wound up staring into blurry space, tears trickling down my face and into my left ear.

  I wanted to scream: Tell me who she was! Tell me how many times! But in a sense, the deeper betrayal was what he'd said afterward. It wasn't his extramarital affair that he felt was meaningless, it was sex with me that felt unimportant. All our passionate games had been nothing more than a distraction for Hunter. And he hadn't said he didn't love her.

  I hadn't had the guts to ask if he still loved me. It was like being told I had a potentially fatal illness, and not being able to ask whether or not there was hope.

  From the other room, I could hear the steady click of the keyboard as Hunter typed. Closing my eyes made me feel like crying; I kept hearing my mother's voice, telling me all the things that would go wrong with my marriage after the newness wore off.

  I put my glasses back on and found the remote control. On Channel 54 I found what I didn't know I was looking for: my mother, her perfectly voluptuous size-eight figure encased in a skintight space suit, trying to kiss a poor man's Steve McQueen.

  “I'm not what you think I am,” she warned him as she wrapped her arms around his neck.

  “Baby, the way I feel right now, I don't care if you're really a five-headed barbatrid from the swamplands of Venus.”

  “Well, in that case … kiss me.”

  I settled back under the covers as my mother consumed her prey.

  EIGHT

  The decision to take a sick day and go visit my mother was something I began to regret before I had even arrived. All the way to Pleasantvale, I kept rethinking the moment of sleep-deprived weakness when I had made the call to work. Surely it would have been better to go in and lose myself in rounds before receiving the obligatory birthday card and cake at lunchtime. But once I had made the call, I couldn't unsick myself, and the idea of staying home all day to be ignored by Hunter felt too much like self-inflicted torture.

  So I took a cab to 125th Street and waited for a train on the high, rickety platform, along with a loud young mother with two small children, a middle-aged man carrying a biology textbook, and a suburban matron in her early sixties—folks who couldn't be bothered to go all the way downtown to Grand Central.

  “My daughter said this station was safe,” confided the white suburban matron in her Burberry raincoat, “but I don't know.” She patted her lemony hair with one hand. “It seems very run-down, don't you think?” To our left, the mother screamed at her children: “You go near that edge and I'll kill you!”

  “Bill Clinton thinks it's safe,” I said. “He has an office around here.”

  “He can afford to.”

  I laughed. “I'm going to see my mother in Pleasant-vale. That's scarier than anything you're likely to meet around here.”

  The woman smiled, revealing coral lipstick on one tooth. “I'm sure she'll be very happy to see you. I'm on my way to s
ee my younger daughter's children.” She pulled a stack of photos out of her wallet. “Look, that's the three-year-old in the Easter dress I bought her last year; she's got lovely dimples just like my daughter had. And that's the five-year-old; she takes after the father's side—they all have that hard-to-manage Italian hair.”

  The train arrived, saving me. I moved far back, away from the chatty lady in the expensive raincoat. There was no way to explain to her that my mother would not be happy to see me. My mother was not like other mothers: Cats and dogs were her dimpled favorite grandchildren, and I was the unfortunate inheritor of my father's bad genes.

  Of course, if I'd said my mother's name, the lady would probably have gone into verbal overdrive. As Piper LeFever, my mother made six films between 1974 and 1979, the year I was born. She'd appeared in Beware the Cat! (as the youngest of three sexy witches terrorizing a small village in medieval En gland) and The Harpy (as a morsel for a big vulture), and had made quite an impression on one reviewer in Lucrezia Cyborgia (as a dangerously beautiful alien in a skintight space suit). Her first starring role had been in Blood of Egypt (as a mousy librarian who is really a powerful priestess of the ancient Sect of Anubis), which was followed by Satan's Bride and El Castillo de los Monstros, her last movie. El Castillo de los Monstros was my father's big break. Only twenty-five at the time, he replaced Domingo Santos as director after my mother drove the man to a nervous breakdown. My father, who is Spanish, knew how to handle temperamental women. He made my mother pregnant and finished the picture right on schedule.

  I'm not exactly sure why my parents left the West Coast, or even whose idea it was to buy a splendid Spanish-style house in Pleasantvale, thirty minutes from Manhattan. I guess it must have been one of those rare decisions they came to jointly, without arguing. In any case, it was a strange sort of place to grow up in, a great fanciful villa modeled on El Greco's house in southern Spain, smack-dab in the middle of a resolutely working-class neighborhood. The house, which was built in the 1920s, had come first, and the neighborhood had grown up around it like the forest of thorns around Sleeping Beauty's castle.