A Gentle Hell (6 page)

“A neurosis born of childhood trauma and fear of abandonment,” one psychiatrist said after the other. What was never taught in the Freudian hell they were spawned from was that knowing the origin of a problem rarely dispelled it. Tell me doctor, what is logic to the red-headed woman with the numb arm outstretched, shivering until her eyes almost fall into her palms like seeds? See her here, knuckled white, holding her tattered skirt together with pins, her hair blowing so hard in the wind I think it might punch the moon. Watch me disappear, cease existing, until I close my hand around hers and lead her back inside.

“One of these days something’s going to snatch you away,” I often said to her. I lead her over to the couch when I got home and I kissed her chin. She clung to me without speaking.

“I thought you would never get home,” she said like always. “A butterfly landed on my hand, and I thought it was you. But it wasn’t. It was just a butterfly.”

“I’m here,” I said, “I’ll always be here.”

As she lay beside me in bed curled around me until it became hard to breathe, I thought again of leaving her. But the next morning I prepared for work, kissed her on the forehead, and left.
Only to repeat the process the next night.
And the next.

But before I go any further, let me explain to you the beginning of all this. The only reason to tolerate such a restricting neurosis from a woman would be to have a neurosis of your own, wouldn’t it? I can’t say for sure, as I’ve never been one to roam the neuter-washed halls of the psychiatrist’s office pulling my brain out until it stretches into a jump rope. Maybe it was because my mother taught me chivalry, or I had a savior complex. Maybe it was because, despite the ghost she’d become, that I truly loved June.

But I’d like to think it was because of the white dress.

We were both sixteen and shy and our parents arranged all of our dates because they probably thought without their intervention we’d be virgins forever. Chaperoned, like in the old days, we walked side by side without touching - gloves on our fingers. I talked until my tongue became numb. June rarely spoke. I kept trying to coax her into speaking to me, telling me something about
herself
, anything to close the gap between me and her.

“Pretty weather today, isn’t it?” I said, almost cringing at the words.

June uttered a soft “Yes,” and looked at the ground.

“When I was younger I used to climb those trees over there,” I said, and I pointed out toward the grove of persimmons on the horizon.

“Oh,” she said.

I looked back behind me and my father was trying to look inconspicuous as he stood behind a mailbox sipping a cup of coffee. When he saw me looking at him he winked and gave me a thumbs up.

“You want to go look at the trees? Here, I’ll take you.”

She made a noncommittal sound and stiffened when I slipped my gloved hand into hers. We walked underneath the persimmons trees and I kept thinking that this scene should’ve been idyllic, perhaps even romantic, what with the orange blossoms of the persimmons and the overcast sky like a sugar rush. I’d read stories of young love and I wanted to bury my fingers in her bright red hair and kiss her gently like virgins do.
But there was only the stiffened fingers in my own, the silence between us.
She tensed
when
 
I
brushed the beetle off her shoulder.

 
I told my mother I didn’t want to see her anymore.

“Why?” my mother asked, almost frenetically, so that the tomatoes she was cutting up transformed into a murder scene, “What’s wrong with June? She’s gorgeous.”

“I don’t think she likes me,” I said. “She never talks to me.”

“Of course she likes you.”

“I don’t want to see her anymore,” I said, and the dates stopped.

A few weeks after we stopped seeing each other, a knock came on my bedroom window. I was in bed, reading Kafka or something equally pretentious. I thought at first the knock was the tree scraping against the pane as it always did when the weather turned fierce. But the knock came again, louder this time.
Then again.
I threw the book on the bed and peeled back the curtains. June stood outside my window in the crooked bower of the tree, her hands grasping at the limbs, her toes barely touching the ground like those of a ballerina mid pirouette. She wore a white weave dress, almost translucent, and I could see the dark nipples of her barely-
there
breasts protruding from the fabric.

I opened the window. She spoke to me, but in the wind I couldn’t make out her words.

“What did you say?” I asked.

She spoke again.

“I can’t hear you,” I said, “come here.”

I outstretched my arm for her to take. She unhinged herself from the tree and took my hand. This time we weren’t wearing gloves, touching only skin on skin, and she didn’t stiffen up as I helped her climb through my bedroom window. When I had closed the window to the wind, I turned back to her.

“Okay, now what was it that you said?”

“Hey,” she said quietly.

She looked like she crawled out of a dream, wild girl in the white dress, bra-less and barefoot. I thought at any moment she’d detach herself from her limbs and metamorphose into a vine sticking straight out of my wall.

I moved toward my door and locked it, slowly so that the latch didn’t click.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“You stopped seeing me,” she said. She looked at the ground when she spoke this, and her hair fell over her eyes.

“I thought you didn’t like me.”

“I like you,” she said.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I spoke softly, afraid that any moment my mother or father would knock on my door.

“I couldn’t tell,” I said.

“You’re smart, and kind,” she said, “and you have eyes like an owl that once broke his wings in my backyard and died in my arms. And when you touch me it’s not like the other boys touch me. You touch me like, I don’t know, like good philosophy.”

I continued to sit on the edge of the bed, unable to move. I opened my mouth to speak, but it was as if it was stuffed with leaves - I couldn’t speak. This was the most I’d ever heard June say.

She crossed the room toward me and when she took my head in her hands her fingers shook as if I was an electric fence.

“Don’t stop seeing me,” she said.

She kissed me. Her white dress glowed with the ferocity of an atomic bomb.

“I won’t,” I said. “Okay, I won’t.”

Two years later I married her in the summer underneath the persimmon trees, and she wore the same white dress as the night she’d climbed through my window. We moved into a small house on the edge of the woods. Neither of us went to college; I took up an apprenticeship as an electrician, she became a sales associate at a small boutique in the center of town.

Though her neurosis hadn’t yet begun, I still saw the seed of it. Even before we were married, she clung to my hips. She paced the house when she got home from work before I did, oftentimes calling my cell phone three or four times to ask if I was okay if I didn’t come home at the regular time. She often pressed her face against the window to check if I was walking up the drive way, and several times I saw her silhouette like a lost ghost, the flash of the curtain falling down.

I thought perhaps she needed a distraction.

“What did you want to be as a child?” I asked her one night at dinner.

“I don’t know,” she said, always the hesitant introvert.

In the distance, the neighbor’s dog barked.

“Does he ever keep quiet?” she said.

“There wasn’t anything you liked to do?” I asked. “And don’t worry about the dog.”

“Well,” she said, and she set her fork down, as she always did when she spoke about something that was private and could only be extracted from her with precise words, “I used to draw a lot. And paint. I always liked doing that.”

“Why did you stop?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “why does anyone?”

So I built her a small studio up in the attic, set up an easel, canvases, a box of oil paints, a desk with sketchpads and graphite pencil, a work lamp. I knocked out part of a wall and built her a window. It seemed to work for a little while. She still paced the floor, but at night instead of clinging to me until I finally collapsed to go to bed she’d stay up in the studio for a few hours drawing or painting.
Nothing special, flowers or the red barn on the other side of the street, children with button eyes and disproportionate limbs.
The important thing was that it kept her occupied for a while.

But one day I came home and she was nowhere to be found - not standing by the window or pacing the floor or upstairs in the studio. I went down into the kitchen and called her cell phone. No response. I figured she had been caught up at work, so I crossed the kitchen about to open the refrigerator. That’s when I heard her scream.

I ran to the back door, grabbing the first thing that I could think of, a wrench sitting on the counter that I’d used to fix the washing machine.

“June!” I called. I couldn’t see her out there - and the

From behind the fence, she screamed again.

I jumped over the fence and found her face down in the dead winter grass and the neighbor’s dog tearing at her back, biting into her neck. Blood ringed the dog’s muzzle, a strip of her sweater hooked into his teeth.

“June!”

She made a rasping noise as if trying to call out for me, and the dog stepped on the back of her head with one paw, pushing her face further into the dirt. I ran across the field with the wrench held tightly in my fist.

When I got close enough the dog turned toward me, snarling. I saw the rabies foam in its muzzle and when he lunged at me I hit him in the side of the head with the wrench. He wailed and fell into the grass with the force of the blow. I hit him over and over again until he was dead.

That night in the hospital the nurses had to hold June down as she got shot after shot into her stomach. I held her hand and she turned her head from side to side with sick sweat on her forehead. Her back and neck were covered gaping holes of gore.

“He took my wings,” she kept saying, “that dog took my wings. I’ll never get better now.”

“It’ll be over soon,” I said.

Even in her delirium, she insisted she keep the sweater and mend it, though I could never wash out the blood.

It got worse after that. She quit her job because she saw rabid dogs lurking everywhere, in bushes and back alleyways and in the eyes of customers. She refused to go out into the backyard or in the field where she’d gotten bit. Instead she stayed in the house trying to stick her fingers through the nylon sutures in her neck. She stopped going up into her studio to paint or draw, and wouldn’t tell me why - perhaps because even in the innocuous paintings of children and flowers she saw herself reflected back, and in herself she saw the virus and the rabid dog.

She clung to me with a new ferocity. Consolation meant nothing. If I wasn’t in the room, stuck to her, then it meant that I must be in the back field, face down in the dead grass, a wild creature tearing my wings out. Or that at any moment a dog might bust through the window, spraying glass across the living room, and set in to devour her. When we had sex she did it quietly, focused, her arms wrapped around me and her red hair dripping down over my eyes. She rocked on top of me with the steady rhythm of a hypnotist, not with pleasure, but with mechanics, as if she could seduce me with squeezed hips and sweat to never leave her side.

“Only two people die of rabies a year in the entire country,” I said. “You’re going to be fine.”