“I mean,” I said, “how we got here. Not the baby part, not how we got pregnant, who the guy was. I mean, you can tell that, too. But what I mean is the moment when getting here, to this room”—I gestured with both hands, pointing down at Sandra’s thin carpet as if it might be possible to misunderstand which room I meant—“with the wine and the kid and the no partner, the moment when that became inevitable.” Sandra’s carpet was a collection of stiff loops, the loops the color of brown rice.
Fran coughed. I suspected her of having some kind of benefactor. Not because she lived well but because on her own I could not imagine her living at all. Not just her breasts seemed shriveled, her face, too, her nose like a hard beak and the skin behind it sloping away. Sometimes I saw Fran holding her son, improbably large, his legs a procession of plump rolls, the tendons in her upper arms visible as she lifted him above her head, her son giggling and Fran making a noise with her mouth, the noise trying to sound like the word whee but coming out labored, coming out scratchy and choked, and I wondered that she didn’t drop him. My son, a shriveled raisin in comparison, like a snack for Fran’s or maybe like the wrinkled shit he’d taken after eating his pureed peas. And breast milk was supposed to be so good for a kid. When she cradled her son, stroked his forehead with her long fingers, it was easier to understand, Fran’s strength. A witch in a fairy tale, hunched over her prize.
“Look,” I said, swallowing the rest of my wine, putting the glass down on the coffee table, “I’ll start. I’ll start so you can see what I mean.
“How I got here is I started dating a guy at work,” I said. “Jeff. His name was Jeff.” This was not true. “I was twenty, still in college, this was the summer between junior and senior year, so technically this wasn’t a job, it wasn’t work, it was an internship.” This was mostly true. I didn’t intend to make my story all the way up, but I did want, for no important reason, for my story to be unverifiable, for Jeff to be untraceable. “He was older, married. Not so much older, early forties, and I was twenty, an adult.” Dominique had settled into her chair, stuffed, its fabric patterned, busy. Her father was French and she’d been raised in Avignon but her mother was South African, had emigrated in her twenties, and so Dominique’s accent in English was not purely French, had in it also something adjacent to British. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were curved in a smile. We’d had lunch a few times, Dominique and I; dinner once and, over dinner, conversation. She’d cooked for me in her apartment, small but well-appointed, leather and blond wood and thick, spotless velvet, and in a neighborhood in the city’s northeastern-most corner, a neighborhood in which I could not afford to live. I’d noticed her bookshelves, built-in, custom-made she told me, noticed they were filled with books. The first functional bookshelves I’d seen since I’d moved from Los Angeles. It was important to me that Dominique find my story interesting. “Two kids,” I continued, “a boy and a girl. I looked the girl up recently. She’s in her freshman year at Penn. Blond hair, straight teeth, plays field hockey. No visible damage.” Not Penn, a less prestigious school. Otherwise accurate. Well, to the best of my knowledge. “Anyway.” I shrugged. “It didn’t work out. Obviously. The summer ended, I went back to school. I say back but the internship was in New York and school was in New York and of course because the internship was in New York Jeff was also in New York and for a while we kept seeing each other. And Jeff told me, kept telling me, that he was going to leave his wife.” Another shrug. “And I believed him. Though maybe also I knew he wouldn’t because around this time I started riding subways out to the end of the line, subways and also escalators, riding them up and down and then up again. I liked being in motion.” I was sitting on the floor and now I began picking at Sandra’s brown-rice carpet with my thumb and index finger. The escalators were not really meant to be part of the story. “There was one escalator in a shopping complex in Pelham Bay Park I rode a lot. Sort of a two-for-one deal since Pelham Bay Park is the last stop on the uptown 6.” My cheeks were hot. I stared at the pale wooden legs of the coffee table. This wood hasn’t been stained, I thought. What’s the word for that. On the couch I heard Sandra shifting. “You know,” I said, “the illusion of movement.” Was the word nude? Nude wood?
Sandra got up and went to the kitchen for more wine. “How long?” asked Dominique. “How long did it last?” In the kitchen, a cabinet being closed. Fran was perched on one arm of the couch. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her thumbing at her phone.
“Nine months. Nine months and I never saw the inside of his apartment. His wife lived there, too, of course, so did the kids, so it was hotels, mostly. He paid. I was in college, he paid for everything, the hotels, dinner out, dresses, a necklace once. He had money, real estate. Real estate law, that’s what he specialized in.” In fact he’d been a professor. In fact I’d been his research assistant. It made the hotel rooms more impressive, actually, the fact that he was paying for them on an academic’s salary. “It wasn’t,” I said, “about the money. And the sex was good but it wasn’t about the sex.” Taking dictation, my knees on the couch, a legal pad propped against the pillows, him behind me, my careful cursive, lifting the pen when he moved against me so the ink wouldn’t smudge. My cheeks were still hot, were burning.
“What was it about?” Fran’s voice, tiny and high. I looked up. The screen of her phone was dark but it was still in her hand. Not expressing interest. She wanted me to get to the point.
“The first time,” I said, “we didn’t have sex. He took me out to dinner, and then after dinner, we went to a hotel. I can’t actually remember now”—I made a sound like a laugh—“how he convinced me, how we got there, subway or cab or on foot. I remember the room. Not a room, a suite: living room, sitting room, bedroom, bathroom.” Saying this out loud it occurred to me: family money. He must have had family money. “He took me to the bedroom.” Sandra was back and pouring us all wine. Dominique was sitting up straight now, her feet flat on Sandra’s brown-rice carpet. She’d had a pedicure recently, her toenails glinted mauve. “And once we were in the bedroom he pushed me onto the bed, arranged my body so that it was facedown. Not rough but firm.” Firm enough that I knew he wouldn’t mind getting rough. Me making my body limp, pliable. “He put one hand on my neck, one hand on the small of my back. He pressed down, once.” Like my body was clay and the bed was a mold. “Then he lifted his hands, stepped back.” Waiting for me to set. “I was still fully clothed. I could hear his breath, my breath. Otherwise it was silent.” I touched my wine glass. I wanted to pick it up, take a sip, but I couldn’t be sure my hands wouldn’t shake, the wine wouldn’t spill. “And then he said, maybe I twitched or something, he said, Don’t move. He said, Don’t fucking move. He said, I’m watching you. He said, I’m watching you and if you move I’ll know so you better not move. And then, for a long time, nothing. Twenty minutes or so. Then he told me to get back up. We went into the living room or the sitting room, whichever room had the TV, and he turned it on and we watched something. I don’t remember what.” I was breathing again. I picked my glass up, took a sip of wine, set the glass back down on the coffee table, hands steady. “The thing is,” I said, “the whole time he was watching me—I didn’t have to do anything. There were no choices to make. I closed my eyes, and my arms and legs—like I had melted into the bed but also I was floating. It’s not that I fell asleep, just”—I gestured with one hand, flung it out—“inside, just, blank. Like I was hovering above consciousness. Or maybe below, I don’t know. His hands were enormous, enormous and hairy, and it hurt when he pressed me down. Just for a moment and not a lot but enough. Enough so that I knew—plus he had this voice, low and full and—but so that I knew not to move. And that I felt beneath his hands—remade in the way that pain, anyway—” I shrugged. “The point is I’m always—my mind’s always—there’s a churning inside, you know? And I know it doesn’t seem like”—I shrugged again—“but there’s a line, and it runs straight from that hotel room to the hotel room where”—I paused—“the comfort I take, in being told what to do. The fact that I instinctively hate kindness. These things were always—but it wasn’t until—”