Lee holds the empty glass in her lap, and closes her eyes. Fragments of memory come, unbidden and unwanted. Uncle—Lee never allows herself to think his name, but the outlines of the word catch in her mind like a burr. She was seven, staying at a family friend’s house in New York City. Everyone else had gone out ice skating, but Lee had had a fever, and even though she was feeling better, he was called to mind her while they were gone. He gave her a giant stick of horehound candy and watched Lee while she ate it, the flavor not so dissimilar from the medicine she had been given before he arrived. He took her into the parlor and asked her if she wanted to play sardines. “But there are only two of us,” she remembers saying. “That’s all right. We’ll hide together.” He found a scarf, tied it tight over her eyes, spun her in a circle. She heard his footsteps receding as he went to find a place to hide. Lee remembers counting, remembers taking a first step, stroking blindly at the air in front of her; remembers how worried she was she’d break something in the pretty, cluttered parlor. After a count of twenty, Lee found him in the butler’s pantry, and he caught her around the waist and settled her on his knee. The rest is a blur, flashes of sensation Lee does not want to let herself recalclass="underline" the wet sound of his breath in her ear, a cloying bittersweet scent in the air, the pressure of his huge hot body between her thighs.
Lee never talks about the memory, and is usually adept at pushing it away. But tonight the images keep coming. She can tell Man wants her to say something, to explain what is going on. He wants to know how to comfort her, but she can’t bring herself to speak. Finally her racing pulse slows, and Lee is able to pull more air into her lungs. She says, “I can’t—I just don’t want you to do that. To cover my eyes.”
“My God, of course.” He grabs her robe, puts it around her shoulders, then rubs her back through the soft fabric. He has a fine line of worry between his eyes and a look of concern on his face, but he doesn’t push her to say anything else.
She takes a few breaths. “Could you make me a cup of tea?”
Man goes into the kitchen and she follows, needing to stay near him. When the kettle whistles she startles again. He hands her a mug and she wraps her hands around it, the heat a thing to focus on, a small comfort. For a long time they sit in silence, and Lee is grateful for it.
In the familiar gloom of the kitchen, Lee bends her head to the teacup and smells the flowery scent of bergamot. As soon as she does, she regrets it. Another flood of images. Lee in the bathroom with her mother. After the rape, once a month for several years her mother had to swab Lee down there with iodine and picric acid—that was what her mother called it, down there, her lips compressed in a tight line as she administered the gonorrhea inoculations. The acid in the bottle a urine yellow with a bitter scent so strong it made Lee’s eyes water. Her mother on her hands and knees in the bathroom afterward, bleaching any part of the room Lee had touched. Her expression as she did so—a revulsion at the chore that Lee knew extended to a revulsion for her daughter. Thank God for her father—how when he held her afterward the cedar scent of his soap overpowered the bitter smell, how he stroked and stroked her hair until she calmed down.
The teacup has gone cold in her hands before Lee is ready to go back to bed. They do that quietly too, and she pulls Man near and lets him hold her until she falls asleep.
The next morning, Lee watches the sun cast changing shadows on the ceiling. Man sleeps next to her, his hands tucked up under his pillow. She eases herself out of bed, trying not to wake him, and when she is sitting up she notices the scarf lying on the floor, still folded over into the blindfold. Again her heart starts racing. She kicks the scarf under the bed, and then wills herself to think of something different. But no matter what she thinks of, she keeps coming back to last night, her sudden panic. In the bathroom she splashes cold water on her face and looks at herself in the mirror, her hair snarled from sleep, dark hateful smudges under her eyes. There is a low-level electric buzz in her head, and when Man gets up soon after, she waits for him to ask her about last night, about what happened. She is glad when he doesn’t.
They spend the day at the studio working on prints from a fashion shoot Man was hired to do for McCall’s. Their time spent experimenting yesterday has left them behind schedule, and Lee is glad of the urgency of the deadline, the banality of the assignment. Glad too for Man’s gestures of affection, his hand placed lightly on her shoulder as he moves around her in the room. By the end of the day she realizes it’s been several hours since she thought about what happened the night before, and though she’s not sure if Man is trying to give her space or feels too awkward to talk about it, all she feels is relief at his continued silence.
A few days pass, and they neither make love nor discuss what transpired between them. Lee feels her shame about her panicked reaction receding, and she knows that if she lets herself, she’ll be able to pretend it didn’t happen. That soon, in another day or two, she’ll be able to have sex with Man again as if nothing is different. It would be so easy to push the thoughts back down from where they came. To close herself off as she is so good at doing. She wonders if he will let her. But another piece of her knows that if she does not tell him—if she keeps him at the same distance she’s always kept everyone—their relationship will never deepen past where it is now. They will never truly know each other. It is how she acted with every other lover she has had, only letting them in a certain amount, then pushing them away or leaving them entirely. She doesn’t want that. So far she has been able to be different with Man, and she wills herself to keep it up, to create something better and more lasting than what she’s had before.
Three nights later, they lie nose to nose in bed, the room lit only by the little stained-glass lamp Man bought for her nightstand, and Lee looks at him—the familiar contours of his face, his long eyelashes—and closes her eyes and knows that every piece of him exists in her memory as detailed as in reality. She clears her throat, but at first she cannot get the words out. The air grows charged between them. Man takes her hand and pulls it to his chest, pressing it there, warm against his skin.
Finally she whispers, “When I was little, a bad thing happened to me. I’ve never told anyone about it.”
“Tell me.” His voice is calm. He gives her time. Sweat prickles in her armpits. She can feel her heart erratically thumping. Finally she continues.
“I went to stay with friends of the family because my mother was very sick. They lived in New York City. The man, we called him Uncle—” She almost says his name but cannot. “I was left alone with him one day. My parents came to get me. I was seven.” She relates the story as it always comes back to her, disjointed and fragmentary, and by the time she is done she is exhausted.
“My God, Lee. I’m so sorry.” Man squeezes her hand gently.
Lee tries to get her breath. Man waits. “After, my parents took me to an analyst for many years and it was very helpful. The analyst helped me realize that what happened—it had nothing to do with me. I should put the memory in a little box and throw away the key. It worked, but sometimes… the memories come back.”
“Of course they do.”
“He also told me that what had happened was just my body, and had nothing to do with my… well, he called it my soul. He said when I got older, I would find someone who loved me, and it would be entirely different.”