He just looked at me lying on the floor. “Poor, poor Vanessa.” He tied his handkerchief around my head so that I could not see. “You want to be the victim forever. How very dull — the one who’s been wronged, abandoned.” I could feel his mouth at my ear, his hot, urgent breath.
“Who hasn’t been asked to suffer terribly?” he whispered fiercely. “How long can vou go on like this?” he demanded. “You can get out of it if you want. Picture yourself free,” he said. “Fight back.” His voice sounded very sad. I began to thrash on the floor trying to get my feet loose. My arms ached.
“You have the ability to escape, Vanessa, but you don’t want to.”
“I want to,” I said.
“Not badly enough. You are in charge of your own life. You are in charge even now.”
“Help me,” I said.
“How can you possibly believe that a man, a stranger really, can come in here and rescue you — help you — save you?” He laughed. “Don’t buy into it, Vanessa. It is the myth of the oppressor.”
“I don’t care. Do what you want.”
“Fight back. Save yourself.”
I began to cry. “Help me,” I said.
“We’ll sit here all night this way.”
“Please,” I said.
“Be ingenious.”
“Please,” I whispered.
“Fight back,” he said in desperation. “Don’t give up.” He untied the handkerchief from my eyes so that I might watch. “Please,” he said. “Don’t make me do this.”
He took his leather belt from the pile of clothes, raised it over his head, hesitated, I thought, for a moment, then lowered it, hitting me over and over again. He was crying as he hit me harder and harder. “Say something,” he screamed. He could not stop now. I felt only pain, nothing else. I could not see him, but only his motions, only his sobs.
“Why?” I cried. “Why?”
“Forgive us,” he said, and I felt a great warmth flowing over me.
“Why?” I whispered, in my blood voice.
“Please, say stop,” he screamed. “Please, say something.” It was the last thing I heard. I must have passed out.
“Untie me,” I said when I regained consciousness, “now.” I could not feel my own body. He said nothing but only followed mv instructions. I was covered with blood. “Lift me to the bed,” I said, “gently. Be careful.” Without a word he did this, too.
“Jack,” I said, and, hearing his name now in my broken voice, he started to weep.
“Please. Please hold me,” I whispered, “just hold me for a minute.
“Now sit in the chair,” I said calmly. “Sit there and watch me sleep. Take care of me. Do you understand?” He nodded. He sat in the chair and said nothing. I slept. I could not bear to stay awake.
When I awoke, he was sitting next to the bed on the floor, his face in his hands. He had not slept. He moved his hand toward me. I pulled away.
“You have the ability to get better,” he said with a huge tenderness, an impossible sorrow, “but you have to want it, you have to work at it. You can do whatever you want.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” I said. “What gives you the right to tell me how to live, to show me the way?”
“You’ve suffered enough, Vanessa, enough.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, my friend. I can never suffer enough.”
“It’s not your fault that your whole family is gone.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Look at you, just look at you.” His anger filled his whole body, the whole room. With the sheer force of his anger he pulled the mirror from the door of the bedroom and brought it over to me. “Look at yourself.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” I said.
“Live,” he cried, “or die. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? You’re going to die, Vanessa.”
“Maybe,” I said. “What does it matter to you?”
“Don’t die, Vanessa. Please don’t die,” he said, and I heard a great wailing. “Invent the wav to live with this. Do anything you have to,” he whispered, kissing me. “Save yourself.”
The day we bought the bord the sun was shining, and the car salesman, who wore a plaid seersucker jacket, whistled “For Once in My Life” as he watched my mother slip one long leg then the other into the small red car. The glare was so great that day that my parents seemed to disappear in it when the Pinto’s doors were shut and they took the car for a trial run around the block.
This cannot go on, Fletcher — you an old man carrying your bitter root across the country in a jute sack. Let it go. Bury it deep in the sand. Let it grow downward into darkness now as it curls from the bag into your arms and crawls onto your back, as it wraps all around you. I always believed you: that somehow there might be a way to live.
Back in Detroit, you, too, loved Wagner and crept to the closet at night, after everyone was asleep, to reach up for him. On those nights something stretched in me, too, and I turned in my crib and cried out. And a few years later, when you lifted your dinner of meat and noodles to your mouth, I shuddered, knowing you were somewhere, waiting for me.
Father and Fletcher sat in the front and Mother sat in the back seat where she liked it best. She closed her eyes. She would try to rest in the car, enjoy life more, spend more time with the children.
Miss Cameron, the associate professor of English, pauses in front of me and smiles, helping me to gather the strength to go on.
As she lit a cigarette from the new pack she had just bought, we tell ourselves that she wanted to live forever.
There were three phone calls that night. The first came from her mother, regal even through the dirty receiver, her image instantly conjured with the sound of her voice. She was wondering whether France, rather provincial, she thought, on her last visit, was the right place for her daughter to pursue her studies in the history of art. Florence undoubtedly would have been the more logical choice. But there was nothing to worry about, her daughter assured her, then asked about her father and promised to write. After a few more monosyllabic minutes she hung up because, as she told her mother, she feared the sound of her disembodied voice.
We know now because we know the end of the story that she will die later on in this small room, but after the second call we forget; we cannot see how it is possible. The second call was to a man, age thirty-eight, named Paul Racine, a fashion designer she had met while in Paris a few weeks before. A flamboyant man, witty, energetic, the type of person Natalie liked to be around: he forced her into animation. The conversation was long and leisurely, and they discussed many things: the upcoming fashions — the shorter skirts, the longer hair, the use of color for spring, the lines of the future, cosmetics — and her chances of being a model. It was a call made by someone who planned to see the spring, someone with plans far beyond this cold January night. “Drugs were never once mentioned,” Paul said when asked afterwards.
“I want to take it back — the idea of my tongue in your mouth, the idea that I could ever love you,” she said to someone whose name we cannot get — the third call.
Some time after the third call the drug was injected, we now believe. As close as we can tell, it was somewhere between nine and eleven o’clock. She then began preparing to go out, combing her hair, putting it up, loosening it, taking it down, putting it up again. She applied and reapplied makeup to her ghost face, painting on cheeks and eyes, composing a mouth. But no matter how much color she added, she remained white as the heroin climbed her arms and reached up for her. Giving up, she put a few lipsticks into her purse — an incomplete work, untitled vet.