He will later claim that I was testing him, but what do I need to prove after all these years together that I don’t already know?
Y
Adrienne was at the dinner table, lingering over coffee when I came in. Rebecca was somewhere else.
“We waited for you as long as we could,” Adrienne said as if the opening line of a memorized speech.
I went upstairs to visit Rebecca, wondered why she hadn’t come down to greet me when she heard me come in. Her door was closed and I knocked. “It’s daddy,” I said.
“Mommy said you weren’t coming home till late,” she said. She was lying on her bed fully dressed, facing the wall.
I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Did you have a bad day, sweetheart?”
“I had agood day,” she said. “It’s you who had a bad day. If you’re getting a divorce, I don’t want to talk to you again.”
I was caught between wanting to apologize for letting things come apart and wanting to insist on my innocence and good faith against charges I hadn’t heard. “What did mommy say to you?” I asked.
“You’ll have to ask her yourself,” she said, then she turned around to look at me. “She said that you both loved me, but that you were not happy with each other.”
She let me hug her for a minute or two, then pulled away. “I’m still angry with you,” she said.
“Becca, I want you to know,” I said, “that I’m doing everything I can to save this marriage. I promise you that.” “Daddy, I don’t know how to break this to you,” she said. “I want to be by myself. Okay?”
“You’re beginning to sound like your mother,” I said.
“Well, she’s her mother’s daughter,” Adrienne said. She was standing in the doorway of Rebecca’s room.
“I thought this was a private conversation,” I said. Rebecca groaned. “Daddy!” she said.
Adrienne, I noticed, was wearing an inappropriately beatific smile. “The two of you looked so sweet together, I couldn’t resist coming over,” she said.
“We were talking about divorce,” I said.
R
It’s morning and I am in bed. My father is shaving away in the bathroom. The motor of his electric razor is like a speeding heartbeat.
My mother says at breakfast she is afraid of roaches not for themselves but for the disease they spread. What disease is that? my father says.
I ask my father if he saw anything on the basement steps. He says, That’s a funny question, Becca. Was there something I was supposed to see.
I don’t say what. I am a mysterious person.
B follows me to school. Does she know who I am? What have I done that’s so bad she has to follow me?
I have an earache at school and ask the teacher if I can go home. They call my mother from the assistant principal’s office but no one answers the phone. I hold my head in my hands.
Later Ms. Dickstein, the assistant principal, reaches my mother and I go home. Where were you? I say to her. I shout at her. I am so mad. Where were you?
A
(I’ve never completely understood how feelings turn themselves around without warning.) His head perches over me, hesitates (he is waiting for permission), then drops into my unmade lap. I may or may not have gripped him by the short hairs at the back of the neck. I’ve been told by Yuri (it’s not something I mean to dispute here) that I suffer from selective amnesia. (Even when I lie it is my way of telling the truth,)
This is what I remember. My hand is at die back of his head. I remember feeling the thickness of his knotted hair. I remember feeling that what I want doesn’t matter (my feelings don’t matter) to Yuri.
There is no premeditation to what I do. I am open to whatever comes next. (He doesn’t know his place, I say to myself.) I am thinking just that as I pull his head away. (I felt assaulted. I didn’t want to be in your debt.) “That’s not what I want,” I say.
“You hurt me,” he says. A giggle escapes from me. (I feel myself trembling.) He is furious.
I cover my face with my arms. “Don’t you dare,” I say. I close my eyes and wait.
Y
“I think it’s nice that you can have talks with your father,” said my saintly wife. “When I was your age, Bee, I couldn’t talk to your father…I mean my stepfather. Spencer.” The voice unutterably sweet, distant, hidden.
Rebecca took my hand and I sensed — it was too dark in tiie room to know for sure — that she was also holding her motjier’s hand. She was connecting us. I felt the connection with such intensity it frightened me.
When I left Rebecca’s room — Adrienne stayed on with her, I had things to do, felt compelled to move on — I experienced a sense of relief. There was more going on in that room than I could stand for long.
Who was I to be so unforgiving? I thought.
Later that night, I sought Adrienne out in die bedroom, where she sat propped up on pillows with her open sketchbook like a napkin in her lap. “You were very sweet tonight,” I said.
An awkward silence followed. Adrienne seemed about to say something, though withheld whatever it was. A vague smile flickered across her face. “What?” I said.
“I felt better about you tonight,” she whispered. “I looked at you with Rebecca and I thought, Well I like him really. I do like you, Yuri.…Some times.” She laughed to conciliate the “sometimes”.
“If you like me, why do we live like this?” I asked.
She laughed giddily. “I don’t know,” she said.
I imagined moving into the bed with her, sliding under the covers, tracing the inside of her thigh with my tongue.
“I like you best at a distance,” she said as if she had read my thoughts. “When you’re next to me, I want to get away.”
“Take off,” I said under my breath. “I don’t want you.”
She turned her head away. “That’s your problem,” she said.
“Look at me, for God’s sake.” I turned her head to face me, held her face. “I’m Yuri,” I said. “I’m the man you chose to marry. I’m the man you love.”
“I see you, Yuri,” she said in a singsong voice. Then she closed her eyes. “I don’t have to see you if I don’t want to.”
“I don’t think you know who I am,” I said. “I’m not the father who deserted you. I’m not the stepfather who patted your teenaged ass.”
She giggled. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “Is this your idea of shock therapy? You really think I’m crazy, don’t you?” She opened her eyes.
“Who am I, Adrienne?” I brought my face closer, posed for the picture she might take of me. I waited with a sense of expectation for her verdict. “I want an answer,” I said. “I’m not going to answer you,” she said.
When I woke in the early morning, Adrienne was pressed against me from behind, her arms around me. She was so close she seemed to have moved under my skin.
A
I feel the blow (my eyes are closed), though he swears he hasn’t touched me. He bashes the pillow with his fist so close to my head that I feel the blow’s menace. My head is spinning. (Did you only mean to frighten me, Yuri? That’s violence too.) I know I’ve been hurt.
I knew I had been hurt. I was in shock. My body was shaking — the fear like sexual feelings. No one has ever treated me this way, I said to myself in outrage. No one. At the same time, it was all terribly familiar. (Yuri is, is not, apologizing.) This is what I remembered. I turned away to let the memory play itself out.