Strange Fits of Passion (13 page)

I sat on the edge of the bed and began to unbutton my blouse. I felt tender toward myself. You will laugh at this, but I was thinking of myself as a fragile vessel, thinking I should take care now. It was a delicious feeling, that I was something special, and I was savoring it, unbuttoning my blouse slowly, in a dreamy way, thinking then not of Harrold but of babies, of having them inside you.

And then I looked up, and he was standing over me. He had his clothes on still, but he was furious. His eyes were black and glassy. I put my hands behind me on the bed, moved away from him, but he grabbed my blouse, stopped me.

I won't tell you what he did to me; you don't need all the details. Except to say that he pushed my face to the side with his hand, as if he would erase my face, and that what he did he did ferociously, as if he would shake the baby out of me. When he was finished, I curled up on my side of the bed and waited all night to lose the baby. But (strong girl) she didn't leave me.

In the morning, he wrapped me up with blankets and his arms, and brought me tea and toast and said we'd call my mother now, and what grand way could we break the news at the office?

There were other times, four or five, when I was pregnant. I didn't know then, and I don't know now, why it was that the pregnancy angered him so—angered him even as he was denying it, saying that he had never been happier. Perhaps it was that he felt replaced or that he was losing control over me for good; I don't know.

He would come after me only if he'd been drinking. He'd come home late from the bar, and I would be afraid of him. I'd be careful to stay away, but sometimes that would backfire. Somehow, sometime during the evening, I would say a word or a sentence that angered him, and he would hurt me when he took me to the bedroom. Later he would always be contrite, solicitous for my well-being. He would bring me things, make me promises.

I believe he couldn't stop himself. I had opened a door for him that he was unable to close. I think that sometimes he wanted desperately to close it, but he couldn't. In wanting control over me, he lost control over himself. He denied it, or he tried to. He was like an alcoholic hiding bottles in a closet; he suppressed the evidence. If you couldn't see the bruises on my face or arms or legs, he hadn't done it. It was how we lived. Once, when he saw me stepping from the shower in the morning, he asked me if I'd fallen.

I started taking sick days when I couldn't go into the office. Then I used my pregnancy as an excuse and did not go back at all.

In February I was five months pregnant. When I went to the doctor, he said, What is this? It was black, a swath of blue-black paint, on my thigh. There was another on my buttocks, under me, but he couldn't see that one. I said I'd fallen on the ice, on the steps of my building, and he looked at me. He said that if I fell, I should call him straightaway. To check the baby. After that visit, I did not go back for a while. I didn't see how I could tell him that I had slipped again.

Toward the end, Harrold didn't touch me. I grew big, I put on lots of weight, and I think he found me frightening. It was the only time I was ever safe from him, for those two months. I wasn't working then; I stayed inside. Or I walked in the park and talked to the baby. Mostly what I said was that I didn't want the pregnancy to end. Stay inside me, I would whisper. Stay inside me.

Harrold was distant, busy. He was gone for days, and then for weeks. He would say he shouldn't go, that he should be around for when the baby came. I knew I was safer without him, and so I said, I'll be OK, I have friends to help me.

I went to a psychiatrist. I told her what was happening. But I was veiled, cautious. She said, You have longings.

I looked at her.

That was it?

She didn't speak. She waited for me to say something.

I asked a question: Are longings wrong?

I started labor in the night, in June. It was a sultry night, soft and sweet-smelling, and I had all the windows open to the air. Harrold was far away, in London for a story. I got my watch and counted pains, and waited until morning so that I could call the neighbor who lived in the apartment next to ours. She came at once and summoned a taxi for me and went with me to the hospital. I knew her only slightly, just in passing, but I'd been saving her for just this day. In the taxi, she held my hand, this woman I hardly knew, and shouted at the driver to take it easy. She said to me, Are you all right? I thought she meant the baby, so I nodded.

And then she said, I have sometimes thought—

I looked at her.

She stopped and shook her head.

At the hospital, my neighbor said goodbye. I told her I would call her. She said, What about your husband? I said, He's on his way.

There was a woman in the next cubicle, but I have told you that already.

My labor was not too long. Twelve hours or thirteen. They say that that is average. When my baby came, they laid her on my chest, and she looked up at me.

When I came back from the hospital, Harrold seemed at first a changed man, and I had hope. He was calmer; he didn't drink. He came home early from the office. He held the baby and fed her from a bottle, and sometimes sat just watching her. When she woke up in the night, he would walk the floors with her until she'd fallen back asleep. I think he felt that she was his—another possession? He would sometimes say that—
my daughter—
but I understood it differently then, that he was filled with love and pride.

My mother came to visit and said how lucky I was to have both Caroline and Harrold, and I thought when she said it: Yes, that is how I feel, I have my family now, and we will be all right. The past is over, and I don't have to think about that now.

Caroline was six weeks old or seven. It was August, very hot and humid. Harrold had been home for three days. It was his vacation, but we hadn't gone away; we'd said it would be too soon to travel with the baby. There was a fan in the window, revolving slowly, I remember, and he'd had a drink, a tall sparkling one with lots of ice, and then another, in the middle of the afternoon. I thought: It's his vacation after all; if we had a cottage, we might be having summer cocktails.

But the drinking put him in a mood. We hadn't been together for several months. He said, It's all right now? and I nodded. I thought that I was ready and that I needed him. He inclined his head in the direction of the bedroom, and I went in there. We had the baby in a bassinet in the hallway, and she was sleeping.

We began slowly, and he was careful not to hurt me, and I was dreamy, languid, thinking: Babies let you start again; this will be a new beginning.

And then she cried.

I sighed and said that I would have to go to her. I started to sit up, but he held my arm and told me no.

Let her cry, he said, ignore her.

I can't, I told him. It isn't right. He held my arm tightly and wouldn't let me go.

She was wailing now, and I said, Harrold.

He was suddenly angry, furious with me. The baby, baby, baby, he said. It's all you ever think about.

He wouldn't let me go.

It was worse than all the other times, worse by far. Because all the other times, there was only me, and I could stand it if I had to. But this time there was the baby, crying in the hallway, crying, crying, crying, and I couldn't go to her. There is no way, ever in my life, that I can explain to you what that felt like.

We disintegrated after that. My voice grew shrill, everything I said was shrill. I remember standing in a doorway, shouting out,
I hate you,
not caring about the consequences. I had the baby in my arms, and I was thinking: She is hearing this.

He became immensely jealous; he thought that I was seeing men while he went to work. He drank heavily every day; the drinks would start at lunch with martinis, and he would go to bars after work. He couldn't bear to be wakened in the night, and if the baby cried, I had to silence her at once—I was afraid that he might hit her too. I began to hope that he would travel more, that he would go away for weeks, so that I could think, could clear my head, but he traveled less than ever. He was convinced that if he left, I would run away with another man. I began to hope that he'd die in an air crash. Are you shocked? Yes, it's true; I prayed for a crash. It was the only way I knew of to get free of him then.

Perhaps because of the drinking, or because he was in more trouble than even I knew about, his work began to suffer. A story he was working on was killed, and then he lost a cover. There was a new fellow in the office, who seemed to be the favorite now. His name was Mark; perhaps you know him. Sometimes Harrold would talk about him with derision, and I knew that Harrold was threatened by this man.

All his life, writing had been effortless for Harrold, but now it seemed that he had lost his way. He blamed me for this; he said that my constant nagging was destroying his concentration. He said that the broken nights were exhausting him, ruining his career.

Oddly, despite myself, I felt sorry for my husband then. It was coming apart too quickly, and he was powerless to stop it.

In October, there was unrest in Quebec, and Harrold had to go to Montreal. He had whittled the necessary traveling down to two nights, but he had to go. I saw this as my chance. I was nice to him all the week before. I had to make him go, I had to make him believe that I'd be faithful, that I wouldn't run away. I was girlish that week, girlish and sweet and pliant, and as sexy as I could muster. You'd think that might have roused suspicions on his part, but he believed that one day I would come around, turn the corner, and he was always watching for that moment. Perhaps he thought I'd given in after all, that I'd seen the error of my ways. I kissed him when he left, and said to him, Hurry back.

When he had gone, and I felt certain he was on a plane to Montreal, I packed a suitcase and got a taxi for myself. I bought a ticket at the airport, and I held the baby on the plane all the way to Chicago. There I boarded the train for the journey to the town where I'd grown up. I carried Caroline and my suitcase up the narrow street to my mother's bungalow.

When my mother came home from work, I said to her, Surprise! I said I'd had a whim, had come home for the fun of it. I said that Harrold was on a story and I was tired of staying alone. She believed me; she had no reason to doubt me. I couldn't bear to have my mother think that all her dreams had turned to dust.

What was I thinking then?

Perhaps I believed that in a day or two a plan would come to me. Or that in a day or two I would be able to tell my mother that my husband and I were having difficulties and that I needed time to think. I don't remember now. In retrospect, it seems naive to have chosen my mother's house to run to. Where else would I logically go? And he knew that. Knew it at once, knew it when he opened the door to the empty rooms.

He called. My mother answered the telephone. I could not tell my mother not to answer her own phone. Her voice was full of happiness and light, and she said to me, It's Harrold!

I took the phone from her.

I think I had hoped that he would go to the apartment and see me gone, and take some time himself to think. That he might somehow welcome this reprieve. I had acted, extricated myself, released him from our terrible bond. Perhaps he would be grateful.

His voice was ice, full of clarity and intent. He said, If you don't return at once, I will come and get you. If you run away, I will find you. If you ever take my child away from me again, I will not only find you, but I will kill you.

He said these words, and I was looking at my mother, and she was smiling at me, holding Caroline's arm, teaching her to wave to me. My mother was saying to my daughter: Dada! Dada! It's Dada on the phone!

I can see you shaking your head. You're bewildered; you're confused. You think me unwell, as crazy as he was. Why did I go back? Why didn't I call the police?

Why indeed.

I believed that he would kill me if I did not go back. Or I couldn't tell my mother the truth. Or I thought that I had no right to take his child away from him. Or in my own dark way, I loved him still.

These reasons are all true.

When I returned to the apartment, I was seen to have capitulated utterly. I was punished for having run away, punished for having deceived him with charm the week before, punished for having stolen his child. He would hurt me physically, or he would be cold to me, or he would be derisive.

Look at you,
he would say to me.

I went outside infrequently. I talked on the phone only to my mother, and everything I said to her was false.

***

I haven't told you anything about where I am. I think I should, although there isn't that much to tell.

When I came here, they searched my body. They took my fingerprints and my picture.

I have a cellmate, but she is quiet. She has been convicted of having stabbed her uncle, who functioned as her pimp. She exchanges sexual favors with women now for large quantities of tranquilizers and is sleeping out the rest of her sentence. The guards know this but don't mind. A sleeping prisoner is an easy prisoner to take care of.

Although I have a kind of solitude in my cell, the noise level in this block is deafening. I think I mind that the most, the noise. Even at night, there is talking, calling, laughing, screaming. They make you sleep with the lights on. I haven't yet discovered how to ward off all the noise or the light, but I am learning that the writing helps. I am creating a wall with the writing that is a kind of buffer.

I am in here with women who are thieves and drug addicts, but I'm not afraid of the women. I'm afraid of the staff. The staff have power over me; they determine everything I do.

The women who are awaiting trial or sentencing live in a suspended state, like purgatory or limbo. We say at meals or in the yard, Do you have any news? Or, Do you have a date yet?

In June, on her birthday, they brought me Caroline. She was walking. I hadn't been there to see her take her first steps, and though I was proud that she was walking, watched her walk to the table and fall into my arms, I was heartsick too. I could see that she didn't really know me.