—And I’ll let you live until you give birth to him.
It was a ludicrous, medieval thing to say. I didn’t know how to respond. I wanted to laugh. I wanted her whole family out of my life.
—Please, Eleanor—
—Don’t say my name. I will cut your face. You don’t need your face to give birth. And if you’re lying, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to cut out your eyes!
Her eyes were so little. I was tired of being a sponge. I wanted to kill her for saying something so silly.
—Where’s the nearest supermarket? she said, as though she were asking for directions.
* * *
ONE TIME WITH BIG SKY there was a scare. We never used condoms. He always pulled out. He was good at it. There are men who don’t know when they are about to come, and those men shouldn’t be allowed to fuck. But Big Sky was careful and aware. This one time he was about to come at the same time that I was. And I didn’t want him to pull out and ruin mine. I was on top and I squeezed my knees into the sides of his waist and crushed myself onto his pelvis with all my weight. I could feel him bucking to get me off, but I kept my eyes closed and pinned myself down. It was like the time I rode a mechanical bull in Nashville. I just concentrated on becoming one with the thing beneath me. At last I went limp and he shoved me off. What the fuck, he said, are you fucking crazy?
And I thought, Am I? No, I decided, I was not. In fact, I believe that was the only time in lovemaking that I truly acted for myself.
He was in agony for the weeks that followed. I could tell that Sundays were the worst. Probably he and his wife and son would come back from a stroll around Central Park, eat a nice summer dinner on that impressive stone patio and, after putting the child to bed, the wife would retire to their bedroom with the book that everybody was reading and he would tarry downstairs, drink a Boddingtons. He would text me around eleven, just a question mark.
Once I waited until the following morning and typed only the letter N. And then, realizing he might think I meant Negative, I wrote another message to follow the first: Nyet.
We had the talk one weekday afternoon at Salumeria Rosi. I ordered prosciutto and bufala and, to fuck with him, I also ordered a pot of pickles. He said, Listen, if it’s. If you are. I’ll take care of everything, obviously.
To make sure I didn’t misunderstand, he said, I mean financially, the procedure. I’ll come with you, too, of course. If you need me.
I nodded. I loved that restaurant, the silken slices of prosciutto and the pillowy discs of mozzarella, but I didn’t have an appetite. I thought that if I swallowed the pickles, I’d throw them right back up. Then he really would have shit his pants.
My period finally came on a Sunday and even then I didn’t tell him I’d gotten it until Wednesday. When you’re in love with a married man, the truth is that you are in hate with a married man, and you have to take succor where you can find it.
* * *
THE SUPERMARKET I CHOSE WAS the Ralphs in Pacific Palisades. I liked it because it was easy to park there.
In the car Eleanor kept her gun pointed at my face the whole time. She told me she didn’t care about going to jail, that she would shoot me anywhere. I didn’t believe her. The gun was likely not loaded. Or maybe it was. It’s not that I didn’t care if I died. It’s that I knew I would survive.
I parked my Dodge next to a motorcycle. She pressed the gun against my back going into the market. Once we got inside she put it in her pocket. She followed me down the women’s health aisle. There was a teen and there was a woman in her forties. The teen was looking at Monistat, the older woman was reading the back of a lubricant box. I took an EPT off the shelf because it was the brand I always bought.
In the single-stall bathroom I knew there was a small chance I might die. There was nothing I could do. I said, Everyone will hear. And she said, I have nothing.
I held up my mother’s white dress and peed over the cream strip. I had always been fanatical about peeing for a very long time on the strip. But that time I did it quickly. Then I shook it off and rested it on the edge of the grimy sink. In the past I would leave the strip in the bathroom for a long time. There’s nothing more horrendous than coming back too soon.
I didn’t think about the possibility that the strip would be positive. I obviously hadn’t fucked Big Sky the night Vic killed himself. I hadn’t slept with Vic in ages and I hadn’t slept with anyone else.
Until Marfa. Which I didn’t consider sex. Because the thing is, one could call it rape. It was half a rape, or three quarters of one. Like Alice said, there are rapes for which we shower, put on our nice shoes. The man, John Ford, had one of the ugliest faces I’d ever seen. Large brownish teeth, horny gray eyes, zero lips. There was a sign outside the hotel: WE’RE OPEN WHEN WE’RE OPEN. I sat in the lobby bar eating ceviche with too-thick rings of jalapeños and drinking Bloody Marys. The cubes of tuna on my plate were dark and warm and stringy. He sat down next to me and asked the bartender for a grasshopper. Even from not very close his breath smelled like metal.
A song I liked played in the lobby and he smiled as I moved my body to it. Later, when we were in his motel room, he would play the same song. He acted like I should be impressed. I found it ridiculous.
I tried to leave twice. I couldn’t say how he got me to stay the first time—maybe it was the idea that it would be a free night of sleep—but the second time he gripped my arm. The hold didn’t really hurt. I could have freed myself in that first moment. He turned me so I was facing away from him and lifted up just the back of my dress. He swiped my underwear to one side and pulled my right leg away from my left. He did it very crudely, laughing, so that it was like a mock of rough handling. His penis was indefensibly small. When he slid himself inside of me, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a finger. It felt like a little length of chalk. Yeah, he said over and over, going in and out, pincer-gripping my arm. I squirmed and said, Please stop. But I didn’t say it loud enough. I didn’t try to push him off because I was worried he would become more violent. Grossly, I was feeling bad about the size of his penis. I didn’t want him to know how absurd it felt and yet I hated him with every cell in my body. That was when the seed of what I would end up doing was planted. Of course, it was planted when I was ten years old, but I hadn’t been paying attention to how tall it was growing all my life.
Finally I kicked a leg back at him, like a horse, and tried to free my arms. But he exercised a remarkable strength, pinning both my arms against the wall. It lasted less than a minute. He thought he pulled out in time but I guess he didn’t. In the morning I washed my dress in his sink and left before he woke. I sped away in my car and the first minute on the road a bird flew into my windshield and remained there—orange, red, and blue—until hours later, when I stopped for gas. The horrified attendant scraped it off while I bought lottery tickets.
So I suppose Marfa was the thing that did it. In the wheelchair-accessible bathroom of the Ralphs the test took a minute or so. Eleanor stared at it and I stared at the ceiling. I was waiting for the sound of the gun. I knew what one sounded like now. Then there was an intake of breath and the small noise of a dumb young kid. I looked down. I saw the plus sign, rendered in cornflower.