He faltered back. Neither of them moved for a time. Again, there was just the sound of their tattered breathing, her crying.
Gasping it out, low, not looking at him, she said, “Oh, God. God!” She straightened, still clutching the shower curtain. And now her voice was bitter and defiant. “Do you get it now?”
They stood there looking into each other’s eyes.
He saw the splintered and bent frame of the door, and the door itself, lying askew across the counter next to the sink. His heart was hammering in his temples, and he took another step back, one hand reaching for the broken frame. “God, baby.”
“Go,” she told him. “Please. Leave me alone. Please.”
He started toward her, but she cowered against the wall and screamed again. “Get away from me!”
Slowly he backed out of the room. “Can we just …” he began.
“Get away,” she said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Just please leave me alone.”
Searching his mind for some way through, something else occurred to him: “Who — how did it — honey—”
“There’s nothing I have to say to you,” she said. “God! Not now.” She sobbed again. Then, sniffling, more calmly: “We’ll talk in the morning. Please. Please.” The words came with the crying, the struggle for breath.
“But — you can’t just — did you know him? Was he with — where was — where did it happen?”
“Will you please just leave me alone.”
“We can’t just—” he said.
“Yes, we can.” She was crying quietly. “I did.”
“I’ll kill him.”
She said nothing, still stood there with the shower curtain pulled up. When he started toward her she screamed. “Don’t you touch me!”
He went out and got into his car and drove to the Midtown apartment. He let himself in and moved to the little bedroom, where the folding bed still stood in one corner. There was an ache starting in his hip from having kicked at the bathroom door in the little house. He had thought his purpose in life was always to be kind and brave and good, but it was clear to him now that he had wanted more than anything else to be loved. It seemed to him that everything was over, all his plans and hopes, all his dreams and wishes and everything in which he had ever put the slightest faith. Then he thought of her and realized the selfishness of his own grief. He removed his shoes, opened the folding bed, sat down, and looked at his hands.
Do You Take This Man
1
Alone in the house, where the only sound was her crying, she had the vision: If she were a character in a movie, Duego would come back. He would leap out at her from a doorway or climb into the window of the house, and there would be a struggle. He would try to kill her. And she would kill him. The story would be over in a single cathartic moment of action. There would be the usual matters to take care of involving police and the courts and the public eventualities, the explanations. The verdict would be that her action was justified, of course: self-defense. Her life would be saved. Her husband would hold her, and they would forgive each other everything.
But in the story she was living, the hours of the rest of the night went on, while she sat, terrified, on the bed, still crying, and intermittently going to the front door to look out. She did not want him to come back; and at the same time she was afraid he would not do so. She wanted the baby, but what had happened to her glared forth, and made her want to be rid of it — shed it, push it out of herself, and be clean again.
“God,” she said aloud. “No.” And then she repeated it. “No.”
She thought of the sixty to seventy percent who went on with their lives. She imagined them never speaking of it. And nobody noticing anything. It must be that in one way or another they found the strength to make a kind of truce with it. Somehow they succeeded in concealing it, and they smiled and laughed and went with friends and made love and they had no nightmares about it, and nobody was the wiser — or else they did have the nightmares and lived secretive, haunted lives, enduring by some means the anxiety and the scarred sense of themselves, the fear of every change, listening always in the dark, carrying the feeling of trespass and violation but showing the world only the polite, desperate lifting of a hand to wave, like that poor doomed woman in the ruin of the south tower. She worked to put the thought away, afraid that, simply by thinking it, she was depriving the dead person of her dignity. And then she thought of the men who committed these crimes and went on with their own lives, and did it over and over again. And yet too many people, men and women both, considered the thing itself a form of sexual excess, or even, awfully, in some mysteriously habituated way, an unacceptable breech of propriety. The whole culture smacked of it, smelled of it.
She sat on the bed, crying now for all those whom she would never know, as if they were all one species together, a type of creature, crouched in the failure of light all around them, estranged from where they lived, crushed by expectations and by assumptions.
And she thought about what her husband had assumed.
Finally, she got dressed and walked in the predawn toward Iris’s. It was growing colder, and there was a fine mist. The mist soaked her as she walked. She let herself in, and quietly made her way upstairs, to her old bedroom, for something else to put on. Then she carried it into the bathroom, and looked at her face in the mirror. No bruising. She got out of the wet clothes and stepped into the shower. It was as it had been in Jamaica, the hot water pouring down, mixing with her tears.
“Natasha?” Iris’s voice, full of alarm.
Natasha turned the water off and stepped out. “I’m all right.”
Iris was standing in the doorway. “Is he downstairs?”
“I sent him away,” Natasha said, wrapping a towel around herself.
“You have to go back,” Iris told her, stepping into the small space with her and putting her arm over her shoulder. “You have to find him. Did you tell him about the baby? What happened? Tell me.”
“He was drunk. We had a fight.”
“You have to go find him.”
“Let me get dressed, please?”
“I’ll be downstairs. But you have to be there when he comes back. I’ll make coffee, and we’ll have a cup, but you must go back. Did you argue with him? You can’t argue with him drunk, sweetie, you can’t do anything with them when they’re drunk. You’re just arguing with what they’ve had to drink. But you have to be there when he comes home, and you can talk to him then. You know that.”
“Please?” Natasha said.
The other shook her head, moving out into the hall. “I’ll be downstairs.”
She closed the door and got into the dry clothes. It was hard to breathe fully out, and she waited, trying to decide what she would say, how she would explain it.
Downstairs, her grandmother had put coffee on. She was standing at the stove, and Natasha saw the thick blue veins of her ankles.
“Sit,” Iris said.
Natasha did so and put her hands flat on the table before her, sniffling. “Can I have a vermouth?”
“Coffee. It’s five-thirty in the morning.”
“Vermouth. Oh, please.”
“So you’ll be drunk.”
“I haven’t had anything to drink, Iris. I–I need something to calm me down.”
“What about the baby?”
“Oh,” Natasha said, crying out. “I don’t want the baby. Not like this.”
Iris stared, her mouth partly open.
“Oh, God. I can’t. I can’t.”