Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn’t mind. Becky’s blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler’s hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky’s jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky’s lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms …
Denise couldn’t remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.
“If you can have this feeling in a dream,” she said to herself, “it must be possible to have it in reality.”
As her marriage foundered — as she became for Emile one more flashy trend-chasing crowd-pleaser from Ardennes, and as he became for her the parent she betrayed with every word she spoke or swallowed — she took comfort in the idea that her trouble with Emile was his gender. This idea dulled the edge of her guilt. It got her through the terrible Announcement she had to make, it got Emile out the door, it propelled her through an incredibly awkward first date with Becky Hemerling. She glommed on to the belief that she was gay, she held it close and thereby spared herself just enough guilt that she could let Emile be the one to leave the house, she could live with buying him out and staying, she could allow him that moral advantage.
Unfortunately, as soon as he was gone, Denise had second thoughts. She and Becky enjoyed a lovely and instructive honeymoon and then began to fight. And fight, and fight. Their fighting life, like the sex life that so briefly preceded it, was a thing of ritual. They fought about why they were fighting so much, whose fault it was. They fought in bed late at night, they drew on unguessed reservoirs of something like libido, they were hungover from fighting in the morning. They fought their little brains out. Fought fought fought. Fought on the stairway, fought in public, fought on car seats. And although they got off regularly — climaxed in red-faced screaming fits, slammed doors, kicked walls, collapsed in wet-faced paroxysms — the lust for combat was never gone for long. It bound them together, overcame their mutual dislike. As a lover’s voice or hair or curving hip keeps triggering the need to stop everything and fuck, so Becky had a score of provocations that reliably sent Denise’s heart rate through the roof. The worst was her contention that Denise, at heart, was a liberal collectivist pure lesbian and was simply unaware of it.
“You’re so unbelievably alienated from yourself,” Becky said. “You are obviously a dyke. You obviously always were.”
“I’m not anything,” Denise said. “I’m just me.”
She wanted above all to be a private person, an independent individual. She didn’t want to belong to any group, let alone a group with bad haircuts and strange resentful clothing issues. She didn’t want a label, she didn’t want a lifestyle, and so she ended where she’d started: wanting to strangle Becky Hemerling.
She was lucky (from a guilt-management perspective) that her divorce was in the works before she and Becky had their last, unsatisfying fight. Emile had moved to Washington to run the kitchen at the Hotel Belinger for a ton of money. The Weekend of Tears, when he returned to Philly with a truck and they divided their worldly goods and packed up his share of them, was long past by the time Denise decided, in reaction to Becky, that she wasn’t a lesbian after all.
She left Ardennes and became chef at Mare Scuro, a new Adriatic seafood place. For a year she turned down every guy who asked her for a date, not just because she wasn’t interested (they were waiters, purveyors, neighbors) but because she dreaded being seen in public with a man. She dreaded the day Emile found out (or the day she had to tell him, lest he find out accidentally) that she’d fallen for another man. It was better to work hard and see nobody. Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal. She believed she couldn’t hurt anybody as long as she was only working.
On a bright morning in May, Brian Callahan came by her house on Federal Street in his old Volvo station wagon, which was the color of pistachio ice cream. If you were going to buy an old Volvo, pale green was the color to get, and Brian was the kind of person who wouldn’t buy a vintage car in any but the best color. Now that he was rich, of course, he could have had any car he wanted custom-painted. But, like Denise, Brian was the kind of person who considered this cheating.
When she got in the car, he asked if he could blindfold her. She looked at the black bandanna he was holding. She looked at his wedding ring.
“Trust me,” he said. “It’s worth being surprised by.”
Even before he’d sold Eigenmelody for $19.5 million, Brian had moved through the world like a golden retriever. His face was meaty and less than handsome, but he had winning blue eyes and sandy hair and little-boy freckles. He looked like what he was — a former Haverford lacrosse player and basically decent man to whom nothing bad had ever happened and whom you therefore didn’t want to disappoint.
Denise let him touch her face. She let his big hands get in her hair and tie the knot, let him disable her.
The wagon’s engine sang of the work involved in propelling a chunk of metal down a road. Brian played a track from a girl-group album on his pullout stereo. Denise liked the music, but this was no surprise. Brian seemed intent on playing and saying and doing nothing that she didn’t like. For three weeks he’d been phoning her and leaving low-voiced messages. (“Hey. It’s me.”) She could see his love coming like a train, and she liked it. Was vicariously excited by it. She didn’t mistake this excitement for attraction (Hemerling, if she’d done nothing else, had made Denise suspicious of her feelings), but she couldn’t help rooting for Brian in his pursuit of her; and she’d dressed, this morning, accordingly. The way she’d dressed was hardly even fair.
Brian asked her what she thought of the song.
“Eh.” She shrugged, testing the limits of his eagerness to please. “It’s OK.”
“I’m fairly stunned,” he said. “I was pretty sure you’d love this.”
“Actually I do love it.”
She thought: What is my problem?
They were on bad road with stretches of cobblestone. They crossed railroad tracks and an undulating stretch of gravel. Brian parked. “I bought the option on this site for a dollar,” he said. “If you don’t like it, I’m out a buck.”
She put her hand to the blindfold. “I’m going to take this off.”
“No. We’re almost there.”
He gripped her arm in a legitimate way and led her across warm gravel and into shadow. She could smell the river, feel the quiet of its nearness, its sound-swallowing liquid reach. She heard keys and a padlock, the squawk of heavy-duty hinges. Cold industrial air from a pent-up reservoir flowed over her bare shoulders and between her bare legs. The smell was of a cave with no organic content.