Fresh Girls & Other Stories (3 page)

          T
he blindfold hugged her cheekbones. The window was open, the night air blew across her body. She licked her lips, tasting Scotch and her own lipstick, the flavor of raspberries. She couldn’t tell if it was raining or not; it sounded like rain outside, but sometimes traffic could sound like rain. She wasn’t sure. She felt confused, cold without her clothes, and the skin itched where her hair brushed against her shoulder blades. She flexed the muscles in her face, trying to shift the blindfold, to let in some thin horizon of light.

But everything was dark.

A breeze blew over her breasts, her stomach. She shivered when his fingers closed on her wrist, tracing lightly
the veins in her forearm. She started breathing hard when he took her arm and did that, running his thumb along the artery like it was a blade he was testing. For a wild moment she thought of bolting while she still could, but forced herself to lie still as he caressed her. She had made her decision by coming tonight, understanding fully what would happen to her if she did. Not like the first time, when she could not have known, when she had woken up the next morning in her own bed, drawn back the duvet, and seen what he had done to her body — this man who had touched the back of her hand so gently the night before when they met in the hotel lounge high above the city. “How sad you look,” he had said. “Do you feel like talking?” She would have brushed him off if he had not said that he had once worked as a counsellor; although she had not been in therapy since the break-up of her marriage years ago, she automatically trusted people in the helping professions, saw them as full of wisdom and good intention. Green candles had flickered on the tables and he had let her drink and talk and even cry about the pressures of her job and the hopelessness of her ongoing affair with a married man. “What’s that?” he had said then, grinning at her as she sniffed and wiped her eyes, “Is that a smile? Oh, I think so — right there, look, almost a smile, a little more, perfect!” And as they left for his apartment she had smiled dazzlingly through her tears.

The next morning she had spent wrapped in her sweater, slumped on her living-room floor in front of the fireplace, in shock. But underneath there had even then pulsed a vein of excitement, remembering the flames reflected in the stranger’s green irises across the table, his oddly full, sensuous mouth. Remembering how at the instant she knew she was incapable of movement in his restraints, she had been stunned by how safe she felt in the absolute darkness of her life given over to another.

Now he pulled her left arm back past her head, buckling a strap of leather around her wrist. She wrapped her fingers around the bedpost, felt the leather clamping on her other wrist. A momentary silence. Where was he? Standing above her? Was he waiting by the far wall with lamplight on his face, studying her? She tried to turn her wrists but they would not turn inside the restraints.

Hands gripped her ankles, pulled them down. The slap of leather cuffs against bone, her legs stretched wide. Someone was breathing evenly in the room. She tried to move her limbs and couldn’t. When she turned her head towards her right wrist, pulling at the shoulder, she could feel the tension all the way down her left leg to where her ankle was strapped to the railing. She was spread like a star on the bed, the cool comforter under her and the wind flying across her body.

Even as the fear increased, she felt a strange relief creeping in, that he was now in control of what would happen to her. She could not be held responsible for anything that happened next.

She thrust her hips towards the ceiling, pressing her fingers together and trying to slide them back through the cuffs. She knew he liked to see her struggle. He was standing over her, breathing into her hair; she could feel his breath quicken with excitement, warmer than the air from the window. He tugged gently at her chin and then shoved a ball gag into her mouth, like a fist. She choked, panicked, forced herself to relax the muscles of her face. Leather straps ran down her chin and up her forehead; he lifted her head and started to buckle the straps underneath her hair. Pain clenched the base of her jaw as she held the ball between her teeth.

Someone crying, salt in her mouth and the fabric of the blindfold moist and hot. Something rising from her chest and her shoulders like an ache, something being massaged out of her until gradually a part of her mind grew dark and sleepy, cradled like a baby inside the restraints. A chain was dragged across her stomach, and then she felt the clamps bite into both nipples. He tugged at the chain, it lifted from her body in a silver arc, and her nipples rose to meet his invisible hands. Someone was still crying. Shut up, shut up, she wanted
to say, but the sobs kept coming and wouldn’t stop, like the first night in the lounge, when she wept in front of this stranger and felt the tremendous release. Then she heard the short, sudden whistling high in the air. It seemed to swoop down from the ceiling, and it split across the surface of her body.

Afterwards he sat by the bay window in his armchair, crossing his legs, adjusting the belt of his bathrobe. Light from the street lamps draped thin shadows over the floor, long and blue. He watched her across the room — she was bent over the bed, running her hands through her hair and then through the ropes and chains on the rumpled sheets. Her navy blazer lay crooked across her shoulders and her face was a blur of wet color, the smudged mouth, the pastel eyelids, and the wavy mascara lines down her cheeks. He didn’t think she even knew that she was crying.

The air from the open window was crisp against his bare legs. He flicked the belt of the bathrobe off his thigh and reached for his cigarettes. Watched her lean down to pick up her dress, a designer affair from an expensive boutique; his eyes traced the buttons of her spine, her thin back. Women like her always did amaze him. Often they were as trusting as the underage girls he sometimes picked up in east-end bars with pool tables and staggering men in
stained jeans and baseball caps. The only difference was that the girls grabbed their purses and ran from his apartment counting their blessings that they were still alive. The women with the careers and the condominiums were the ones who came back.

Now her hands were trembling, breasts bobbing inside the jacket like bruised fruit. He eyed her marks keenly: the welts, the drying blood zigzagging down her thigh, the abused nipples misshapen from the clamps that had remained on her throughout the session. Her breath was ragged in the air, halting like she’d forgotten how to breathe, then starting up again too fast, her throat chiseling up and down in her neck. He surveyed her body, then swiveled around to face the window.

It had begun to rain, lightly at first, and then coming down hard. Rain so thick it looked white in the night, smacking the pavement and the grass like bullets. Behind his own reflection in the windowpane he saw her straighten up, hiccupping, pushing hair out of her eyes and trying to fasten it in a clip at the base of her neck. The window reflected the lights of the chandelier blazing above the bed, the pink cloud of the comforter, the dull antique bed frame. The ropes lay uncoiled around her and the riding crop was propped against the wall, stiff and slender. He thought with pleasure that he could see its leather tongue still vibrating.

The rain poured down. He waited, and a moment of lightning filled the sky, bleaching everything silver — cars parked along the street, trees, other buildings. His own face loomed in the window, the smooth cheeks flushed boyishly from exertion, his lips curved and generous and undistorted by cruelty.

He rubbed his palm absent-mindedly. It was reddened from the friction of the whip handles. He glanced again at her reflection; she was sucking in her breath, trying to stop a sob. They both waited for the sound of thunder, but it came from so far away it could have been the sound of someone coughing in the next room of the west-end building.

He sighed, crushing out his cigarette and rising from the chair. Tonight he would let her go, and another night she would return. He knew. Already in the window he could see her starting towards him, tugging her skirt over her lashed thighs, as though he had done nothing.

          H
is gold wedding band catches the light between the two walls of flesh that are our bodies in bed. It is a wide band with a perforated design, and it fits loosely on his finger. When he draws his hand up between us to touch me, the hand seems to take on a separate entity — as though it is a stranger’s hand encountered in a crowded bus or an empty alley, the ring as hard as a weapon. I feel the coldness of it branding my skin. Yet I am drawn to it compulsively, this symbol of his commitment to another, as though it is a private part of him that will derive pleasure from my touch: rubbing it, twisting it, pulling it up to his knuckle and back down again.

In the morning we go for a walk in Queen Elizabeth Park, where a wedding is taking place. There are photographers bent on one knee in the grass, children with flowers looped through their hair, a bride in her layers of misty white. We watch from a bridge over a creek nearby, and then from the top of a waterfall. From that height the members of the wedding appear toy-like, diminished by the vast green slopes, the overflowing flower beds. When I glance sideways, I see him serenely observing the activity below, his hands draped over the low rail. I want then to step behind him, put my hands between his shoulders, and push him over, if only to recognize something in his face, some anxiety or pain to correspond with what I am feeling.

The people we pass in the park see a middle-aged man in a suit with his arm around a nineteen-year-old girl. They invariably pause, look twice with curiosity. At first I look back boldly, meeting their eyes in the harsh sunlight, but as the walk wears on my gaze falters. I keep my eyes trained on the ground, my pointy white high heels keeping step with his freshly polished black leather shoes. I don’t know what people are thinking; I know they don’t think I am his daughter. Their stares make me feel unclean, as if there is something illicit about me. Suddenly I wonder if my skirt is too short, my lipstick too red, my hair too teased. I concentrate
hard on pretending that there is something natural about my odd pairing with this man.

He is oblivious to their looks; if anything, he is pleased by them, as though people are looking because the girl his arm holds captive is particularly striking. He does not see that the looks are more often edged with pity than any degree of approval or jealousy.

He tells me afterwards that he is proud to be seen with me.

Sometimes when he visits me he is carrying his beeper. He has just completed the crawl to the foot of my bed, drawn up the comforter tent-like over his head and shoulders, and is preparing in the fuzzy dark to attack my body with his tongue. And then from deep in the gray huddle of his pants on the floor rises the berating call of the beeper, causing the anonymous bulk under the covers to jump and hit his head against the soft ceiling of the comforter. I resist the urge to reach out and rub that dome under my comforter, like it is a teddy bear or my own bunched-up knees.

Naked, he digs into the mass of material on the floor, extracts the beeper, and seats himself on the edge of the bed. I tuck my hair behind my ear and examine his back as he dials a series of numbers to access his answering service, the hospital, other doctors.

“Good afternoon,” he says. “Is this Dr. Martin? Yes … yes … how is she? All right, one milligram lorazepam to be administered at bedtime …” while he remains half-erect between his long white thighs, one hand groping behind him ‘til it finds and begins to squeeze my breast and then its nipple. Even though he has tucked the phone between his ear and shoulder so that the hand that flaps the air is not the one that wears the ring, I still feel it belongs to someone other than him as it rounds the blank canvas of his back and pats air and pillow before touching skin. I am reminded of the card in my desk drawer: on Valentine’s Day four months ago he gave me a card that read, in a floral script, “I Love You.” He said, almost immediately, “I hope you don’t get vindictive and send that card to my wife. It’s got my handwriting on it.”

It never would have occurred to me to do so if he hadn’t told me. What he said inspired me to keep the card in a special drawer, where I will not lose it. I put it away feeling reassured that at last I had some power over him. I had something I could hurt him with. I now know I saved the card because it was my only proof of his love for me, it is the only part of him that belongs to me.

The night before his wife’s return from the conference she’s attending in Los Angeles, we drive to our usual restaurant where the Japanese waiter smiles at us in a
way he interprets as friendly, while I recognize amusement dancing at the corners of his mouth. I lift my purse into my lap and politely ask permission to smoke.

“I’d rather you didn’t. My wife has a good nose for tobacco.”

How much I want his wife to come home to the smell of smoke in the family car. After she has walked off the plane and through the terminal to where her luggage revolves on the carousel, after she has picked out his face among the faces of other husbands waiting to greet their wives and take them home, I can see her leaning back in the passenger seat, rubbing her neck, tired after her flight and eager for sleep — then the trace of smoke acrid in her nostrils, mingled perhaps with my perfume. In my fantasy she turns to him, wild-eyed and tearful, she demands that he stop the car, she wrenches the perforated wedding band from her finger and throws it at him before she opens the door and leaves.
Give it to that slut,
she will say.

“Maybe I’m subconsciously trying to ruin your marriage,” I smile as I light a cigarette and watch the smoke momentarily fill up the front of the car.

“Please don’t,” he says calmly. I think a man whose marriage is in my hands should sound a little more desperate, but in the dark I can only see his profile against the stores and buildings blurring outside the window,
and it is unreadable. I wish afterwards that I had looked at his hands, to see if they tightened on the wheel.

He tells me that we will have lots of time together over the years but I have no concept of time. I ask him to leave the city with me.

“Would you really do that?” he asks. “Run off with me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m very flattered.”

“Don’t be. It wasn’t meant to be flattering.” I pause. I want to say,
It meant more than that.
“Why can’t we just take off?”

“I can’t do it right now,” he says. “I have people depending on me — my patients. I’d love to. I can’t.”

“I have just as much to lose as you do, you know,” I say, but he doesn’t believe me. He has been feeding me whisky all evening, and I am swaying in a chair in front of him. He places my hands together between his own and pulls me out of the chair, collapsing me to my knees. Kneeling, I sway back and forth and squint up at him, my hands stranded in his lap.

“You should go,” I say.

“Yes, I have to work tomorrow morning.”

“And you have to pick your wife up from the airport,” I say, struggling to my feet to press the color of my lips against his white cheek.

I do not realize I am clutching the sleeve of his suit jacket until we have reached the door, where he chuckles and pries my fingers loose. He adjusts his beeper inside his pocket and walks out into the rain-misted night.

Back inside the apartment I am intent on finishing the bottle of Chivas he left behind on the kitchen counter, but when I go to it I find an envelope next to the bottle, weighted by an ashtray. I tear it open, my heart beating painfully — it could be a letter, he could be saying that he can no longer live without me, that tonight he will finally tell his wife about us. Instead I pull out a greeting card with a picture on the front of a girl standing by a seashore. She is bare-legged, with dimpled knees, wearing a loose frock the color of daffodils. She looks about twelve years old.

Inside are no words, just two new hundred-dollar bills.

He tries to alleviate his guilt by giving me money: checks left folded on the kitchen table, crisp bills tucked inside cards. He takes me shopping for groceries and clothes, he never visits my apartment without bringing me some small gift, as though all this entitles him to leave afterwards and return home to his wife. But I have no similar method of striking such bargains with my conscience. The dregs of our affair stick to my body like semen. Because I do think of his wife — of the way she must sink into bed beside him in the dark, putting her
face against his chest and breathing him in, his scent carried with her into her dreams. I do think of the pain she would feel if she knew, and I am frightened sometimes by the force of my desire to inflict that pain upon her — this wife who is to be pitied in her faithless marriage, this wife whom I envy.

And tonight I want more than anything to take those smooth brown bills between my fingers and tear them up. Does he think I’m like one of those teen hookers in thigh-high boots and bustiers he says he used to pick up downtown before he met me? My hands are shaking, I want so badly to get rid of his money. Instead I go over to the chest of drawers beside my bed and add this latest contribution to the growing stack of cards and cash I have hidden there.

He often says to me, “If you were my daughter …” My lips twist and he has to add each time, “You know what I mean.” If things were different, he means. If we weren’t sleeping together. We cultivate fantasies for each other of what a loving, doting father he would have made me; of what a pretty, accomplished daughter I would have made him. “I adore you,” he says to me. “I wish I could marry you.” And then, “I wish you were my daughter,” as he kisses my neck, my shoulders, my breasts, his fingers slipping between my thighs. As things are, I see we don’t have anything that comes close to the illusion.

His cologne has found places to lodge in my blankets, clothing, cushions. No matter how many loads of laundry I carry down the back stairs, the smell of him has taken up residence in the corners of my apartment, as though to stay.

He tells me little about his activities, but the spare portraits he paints grow vivid in my mind. This weekend he will visit Vancouver Island with his family. I picture them on the ferry, with the possibility of gray skies and rain, the mountains concealed by veils of fog, the treed islands rising like the backs of beasts out of the ocean. I wonder if his family will venture onto the deck and look down at the water, I imagine them falling overboard and being ground to pieces by the propellers, staining those foamy waves crimson.

He’s told me about his three sons and I know they are all teenagers. I know that the oldest is stronger than his father, handsome with a thick head of red hair, and that this son’s feisty girlfriend reminds him of me. I know they tease him with the eyeball-rolling exasperation and embarrassment that I’ve felt towards my own parents.

“Oh, Dad,” they’d groan in restaurants where he’d be teasing the waitress. “Don’t
do
that. She’s in our class at school!”

I imagine him clambering up the gray steel ladder leading to the top deck of the ferry. He reaches down towards his wife. When she grips his hand his ring bites into her palm, a sensation she has grown used to, as though the ring is now a part of his body.

They walk together behind their children, past rows of orange plastic chairs in the nonsmoking section, past the cafeteria selling sticky danishes and plastic-foam cups of hot coffee, past the gift shop with the little Canadian flags and sweatshirts in the window. They wrestle open the heavy door leading onto the deck and the blast of air sucking them out separates his hair into pieces plastering forward, backward, tight against his cheek.

His family races in their sneakers and jeans towards the edges of the ferry, clinging to the railings, and he fights his way through the wind towards them, laughing and shouting. I know for certain that, for once, he is not thinking of me.