Slut Lullabies (17 page)

Mark pats my back while I cry. “We shouldn't have let you come,” he says. “I'm sorry. I know you came to make me happy. I know you're afraid to fly.” And I have to stop crying then, before this can go any further. Already the tears are evaporating. Already, I'm gone.

He will never invade me as this pain has invaded me. He will never give me anyplace else to go besides
me
.

It was inevitable, yes, that's clear. One week before we left the Max Planck Institute. We were Chicago-bound for Mark's new postdoc position, which would maintain his ties with his grad school advisor as well as others from the space physics world, like Diego, who had become a kind of big brother to him and to me. I had a job teaching English at Best Practice high school, an innovative school that seemed to attract progressive, liberal young teachers. I was eager to go home and get back to work. I hadn't had a life of my own all summer in Garching, tailing after Mark and Diego. I hadn't had much of a life out East either, really, despite my teaching. I'd been there for Mark, had never quite adjusted to small-town life, had made few friends with the stoic locals. Mark and I both grew up in the Midwest, so this move was a homecoming—for me a return to the city of my youth. We were giddy, excited to leave.

I went to their office on a night I knew Mark was out with his German class, celebrating his departure. I never wondered whether Diego wanted me, too. I knew only that Mark loved Diego too much—that Diego represented something dangerous: what a life without me would be like for my husband. Strangely, instead of hating Diego for this, I loved him a little myself. He was like a purer form of Mark, a Mark untouched by compromises or a woman's demands. A Mark who knew how to feel more deeply, perhaps, deeply enough to allow himself unhappiness and risk. This was the first man I'd wanted since I'd become a
wife
. I felt, in all honesty, as though I deserved my own secret after living in their boys' world all summer—for the past four years, in fact. I deserved to be a wedge between them, however invisible and unspoken. I deserved to have some power of my own. I wanted to believe that Diego belonged less to Mark than to me, because if that were true, Mark would belong less to Diego, too.

I never even had to make the pass. He had been waiting for me. We made love on Mark's pristine desk because Diego's was cluttered with papers and dusty frames. The sex was only passable, as first-time sex usually is for a woman who has had the same lover for many years. Diego's penis was smaller than Mark's—something I almost ached to tell Mark afterward. Not that this had been a crucial component of my disappointment, though it might have seemed so to either of them, given how men think.

I was on the pill. Mark and I didn't use condoms, and I did not think to use one that night either. Diego had a steady lover, although she was eighteen and an art student so who knew what she was up to. Had I given it more thought, I might have worried . . . but pregnancy did not seem an option.

I found out five weeks after our return to the States. The accident took place two months later, over Thanksgiving. We'd taken a long weekend out East for Mark to do some work with his former advisor. We were meant to have Thanksgiving dinner at his advisor's home; it was rumored Diego was coming up the next day, after a stint in New Jersey with his mother.

I was thinking of telling Diego it could be his child. He wanted a baby. He'd proposed marriage to his young girlfriend, but she hadn't been ready. He admitted they would probably break up. He had told me—Mark and me—that he hoped he would not lose his chance to become a father.

I did not love him. Or, to be clear, I did not love him more than the husband I already had. Yet I wrote about him in my journal, found excuses to reference him around my women friends so I could explain who he was. I was bored, bored with my happiness maybe.

Maybe
that
was what I couldn't accept. I did not yet realize this about myself—this deadness inside me. Maybe it seemed too sociopathic to have slept with my husband's best friend just for sport, and so I fabricated an obsession, maybe even a love, something that would warrant my later telling Diego about the baby.

I'll never know now if I would have gone through with it. The accident happened the day before Thanksgiving, and as it turned out, Diego never even showed up. Had it played another way, would I have left Mark, gone to Germany to raise a blond child of indeterminate parenthood? Or was I looking only for drama, to provoke Mark into fighting for me, infidelity my naive cure for marital complacency?

There are things we tell ourselves. That pain receptors can suck every last bit of air, to the point that other receptors—to emotion, to empathy, to joy—begin to suffocate. Science might back that up. A previously healthy rat may learn to run into walls, then cease to move or care altogether, if subjected to sufficient negative stimuli. There are things we tell ourselves. That guilt is a useless emotion.

I can live with the pain. I no longer fear my fear of it. What I cannot live with is the resemblance this emptied-out woman bears to
that
woman: pain-free in my rental car, driving out to Windsor, the prison-town high school where I used to teach, to say hi to my trailer-park and townie ex-students, to tell my colleagues I was pregnant, to go through all the banalities of reunion with people I had only been all too glad to leave, all the while calmly plotting—with no purpose on this earth that I can recall—to rip out my husband's heart.

Bartók's chair is covered with black hairs so matted together that they look almost like a furry seat cushion, but I plunk myself down on the mess anyway to avoid sitting next to Van on the couch.

“You gotta be careful,” he is telling me. “Tina spun kinda out of control, thinking every time we got together we should score. I had to put limits on it. I don't know, maybe she isn't gonna want to hang with me anymore—God knows there're guys out there who'll give her as much as she wants. I never let her shoot up, y'know. I gotta watch you girls. Y'all can't handle temptation like men can.”

“You're a paragon of self-denial, Van.”

He nods. “You have no idea.”

But maybe I do. He told me once, though he may not remember, that he's pretty sure he date-raped a number of girls in college—that he didn't understand any kind of
no
less violent than a slap. In high school, he was bisexual; he'd blow the bartenders where he bussed tables in exchange for heroin. He used to shoot back then, so this life now is an improvement: clean living, in his view. When he won a Fulbright, he got the chance to embrace a different kind of world, but here he still is, behind a bar, in this shithole apartment with another woman who wants to be ruined. If I love him at all, it is because he never numbed out even though I know he has seen enough ugliness to serve as anyone's excuse. He's still manic as a precocious boy, music and language intermingling with his seedy brand of romance, with the witches' brew of drugs that he still believes, like some 1960s throwback, can “expand our consciousness.” H won't do that for me, I've told him. Drugs take you only where you already know how to go.

“What're we going to
do
?” I lean forward to touch his hand, though I still don't move to the couch. I envision myself beneath him, some invalid girl: tracheotomy bared, prosthetic hook armed for battle. “Once I'm
there
, what do you plan to do with me?”

He looks at me hard. “You'll be nodding. You won't want anything like that.”

“OK,” I say. “Whatever you decide.”

The first time Diego's lips met mine, I felt an explosion so singular it justified anything. I felt grounded in his body even as I lost myself in him. It was the way I felt with Mark at first in those early months, but with Diego it ended before he even entered me. The thrill of the chase—of the betrayal—culminated with our kiss; the rest was just going through the motions. He clutched my shoulder blades, moaned, “You're the kind of woman I could fall in love with,” and I thought,
Don't do anything rash
. I thought,
How long before I can go home
?

“There's something you should know,” I say to Van. “I'm already a junkie. You can't protect me.”

He snorts. “Don't equate your little medicine with this. You have no idea how low you could go. Don't worry, though. I'll make sure it's only the good part that touches you. I'm great at that—I've got it down to a science.”

I don't know how to explain that isn't what I want, so I stop talking; watch him finish, showing me how. I imagine how gently he will slide the needle into my arm someday, like a father. I can trust him not to give up or give in to his conscience—he is the type to keep trying to scrape his way inside, until I can be certain there will be nothing left of me.

“Your husband out of town or something?” he asks before I take my turn. “How're you planning to go back tonight and show your fucked up self to him?” He is perched on his coffee table, his knees touching mine; he can't get close enough to my skin behind my clothing. I am still a fish to him, but soon, I will be something more. “Or is this it, girl? Are you planning to leave him? Are you just staying here?”

“I'm leaving,” I promise, and then I feel an explosion, nothing like a kiss, nothing I can turn off, the opposite of my pain but equally fierce. Nothing like numbness, nothing like peace. “I think I'm leaving everything.”

The incident happens, appropriately enough, at Taco Bell. Even in the days when he was still sane, Sloane could never tolerate fast food. Fast Mexican food was, of course, even worse.

Victoria stands at the counter with Tamara, Violet, and Ned, weary in a burgundy-colored overcoat that looks disturbingly like the one her secretary, Rose, wears (and bought at T.J. Maxx). She is wondering how to keep Ned from ordering more than two burritos. When he actually orders, though (two burritos, two tacos, large Coke, and cinnamon crisps), she says nothing. She is lost in thought about her own weight, which has increased by four pounds since Sloane knocked Violet against the china cabinet last week and broke one of the cups that came from his mother's collection, also giving Violet a bruise on her left cheek. The cashier stares at her, waiting for her to pay for Ned's and the girls' dinners. She does so, slowly peeling bills from her wallet. Sloane, who has been standing near the trash bin, suddenly strides toward them waving his arms. He grabs Victoria by her coat sleeve and shouts at the cashier, “Can't you people do anything in less than two hours? If you can't handle a job in the damn Taco Bell, just where do you think you ought to work? This is the lowest of the low, baby. Sink or swim!”

They are out in the parking lot before Victoria has the chance to apologize.
Honestly, miss, he's fifty-two years old, and I've never heard him call anyone baby in his life
. He opens the passenger door of the Volvo and shoves her inside so that she bangs her head against the roof, and she has to get out again to let Violet, Tamara, and Ned crawl in the backseat. Tamara is yelling, “I'm
sooo
embarrassed, Dad. I can never go back to any Taco Bell in the city as long as I live. They'll probably have your picture on the front door reading, Have you seen this man?” Ned is already eating his Burrito Supreme, and the sour cream is spilling onto his rugby shirt, visible through the open front of his coat. Violet says, “Pig.”

They are halfway home when Victoria remembers her wallet. She is afraid to say anything for fear of Sloane's reaction, but there are eight twenty-dollar bills in the wallet (which itself cost two hundred dollars), and if she doesn't say anything now, there will be trouble later. She says, “I left my wallet at the restaurant,” and no one seems to hear her at first. The kids are all eating in the back, and Sloane is driving too fast. “I left my wallet in the—” she begins again, and Sloane barely turns from the steering wheel but raises one arm and knocks her across the face with a leather-gloved hand. Ned shouts, “Mommy!” but she cannot hear if he says any more than that. Sloane keeps swinging at her yelling, “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” He turns the car 180 degrees and barrels down the street in the opposite direction. Ned is crying now, snuffling sour cream and ground beef out of his mouth while the girls sit silent and still, as far from him as they can manage. At the Taco Bell, Sloane gets out and retrieves her wallet, remarkably intact and still next to the cash register. While he is gone, Tamara touches Victoria's arm, whispers, “Mom, are you OK?” Victoria does not answer. She is thinking,
What's wrong with me? Taco Bell isn't a
restaurant,
for God's sake. Honestly!

Victoria is planning to hold her nursery school's annual benefit at the Yacht Club this year in the hopes that it will make up for the disaster last year. Cartier's was too small a space. For months afterward, she lamented to friends, “I only agreed to it because Tiffany's hosted us the year before.” At the party itself, she'd been sweaty, pink with annoyance. The antithesis of the porcelain, crisp headmistress she wanted to portray. She knows people haven't forgotten.

To make matters worse, Sloane had been drunk. Since going on Prozac a year prior, he couldn't hold his liquor. He kept grabbing her waist and laughing, “If we stay in this fucking room long enough, we'll all come out veal!” Too loud. It made Victoria think of crowded box cars and concentration camps—the one crazy man thrashing and kicking and making it worse for the rest. Still, he was handsome in his tuxedo, and when they danced on the tiny dance floor, she'd felt for just a moment the familiar flush of being envied. Her party, her man, her life. She could sense a change, some shifting in the ground beneath her feet, but she still believed back then. Believed that maybe, if she juggled everything just right, was careful not to fall into the widening cracks, she could still make everything turn out all right.