The Engagement (10 page)

From outside there came the rhythmic night shift of frogs.

“Are you crying?” I asked eventually.

Alexander wiped at his cheek, trying to smile. “Sometimes I think of what you’ve had to deal with.”

His tears shocked me. “I’m sorry?”

“I lie awake and think of them with their hands all over you, making you do whatever it is they want. . . . I mean, I’m only human—of course I get jealous. I love you and so it follows I’m jealous, all right?” Grimacing, he shut his bloodshot eyes and made a low, slow moan. “I try not to picture it, but sometimes I can’t stop. I can’t get the images of you with them out of my mind. Over and over I see all the things they made you do . . .”

“Excuse me, I need a glass of water.” Standing, I walked out of the room.

I could not do this. I just could not. Even if this was a fetish, it had become too strange, too head-fucking. Other than physically, I realized I didn’t know this man well, but I thought I knew him well enough to be sure he wasn’t crazy.

Clearly I’d made a terrible error telling my one client I would be leaving the country. I’d hoped by giving fair warning I was showing him the sort of courtesy he would have shown me. Besides, I could not have him visiting my uncle’s office, asking for another hooker. Had I considered canceling this weekend beforehand? Not really. Stuck as I was on the payoff, I’d prepared for the trip with great concentration. I’d planned my wardrobe from the underwear out, sitting at my cubicle, pen poised unused in the air, anticipating some personalized
belle de jour
.

Alexander was now following me through the cold warren of the house. The lights were turned off, and the smell in certain dark corners seemed to be of damp that had grown into rot.

“Liese, you don’t have to do those things anymore,” he called, mimicking concern, “none of them!”

“I’ll do whatever I want!” I snapped, feeling around on the kitchen wall for a light switch, patting the bluestone harder and harder. If I chose to start screwing hundreds of strangers and charging for it, I damn well would. “Have you ever heard of such a thing as free will?”

He reached over me to flick the switch. “Not in these cases.”

At the sink I filled a glass with water.

“And I’ve read a fair bit of literature about women in your situation.”

“Really? Because you’re the one who had to pay for it. Shouldn’t I be crying for you?” I banged down the glass without drinking. “I want to go home.”

“Well, I can’t drive you tonight. Not after the champagne.”

I stared at him. “Tomorrow I’d like you to take me to a railway station.”

He nodded solemnly, as though this would be possible, then opened the fridge door. “How’s your appetite?”

After seeing the sweet, depressed faces of the animals in the fields, I couldn’t eat more meat. “The best thing for me right now is probably sleep, then in the morning I want to go.”

“But I was planning to cook for you.”

“I don’t feel like eating.”

“Okay.”
He raised both eyebrows. “Are you at least prepared to sit with me while I have my dinner?”

I didn’t answer but neither did I leave. Methodically he took ingredients out of the fridge, cracking eggs into a bowl, beating them; he grated cheese, he poured in milk. The dim light made everything grained as though my sight had suddenly deteriorated. I sat at the table, scanning the room as if the assortment of inherited crockery would give some clue to his sanity—and to whether he actually lived in this house alone. Not one object seemed to have been chosen by him. I kept half expecting one of his parents to return and tell Alexander off for playing with his mother’s jewelry.

Raising my hands to my head, my throbbing head, I caught the reflection of the ring’s diamond across the wall.

Alexander was warming a skillet. “I carried that ring around with me everywhere, worried sick you might leave the country. I’d have done anything to keep you here. It was all I could think about, and I wanted this day to be perfect.” He poured his mixture onto the hot iron. “It’s naive of me, because nothing’s ever how you picture it, is it?”

I almost felt sorry for him. “It’s still been a nice day, Alexander.”

When his omelet was ready, he took a plate and served himself. Sitting down opposite me, he began to eat in silence.

The scent of the food was headier than I’d expected. I tried not to feel hunger.

“We could at least talk about something,” he said peevishly.

“All right, what?”

“Politics, history . . . just, you know, conversation?”

“What happened to your parents?” I’d noticed nothing specific to them anywhere in the house; their photographs weren’t alongside those of the ancestors.

He paused. “A car accident.”

“How did it happen?”

“It was New Year’s Eve, 1986. A dark road. Probably both drunk.”

“That must have been very difficult. Do you have siblings?”

“An older sister.”

“Are you close?”

“Not really.” He stood, stretching to his full height, and took his plate to the sink; an opacity had set around him. “I don’t want you to hold the things I’ve told you about my mother’s illness against her; she was a wonderful person, and our engagement would have meant the world to her. Despite being born into great privilege—at one time her family pretty much owned half the district—she was not a snob,” Alexander assured me.

He ran the taps and started washing the plate and mixing bowl, using no-name detergent and an old wire brush. “She’d want me to be happy and she’d have been delighted, despite our different backgrounds, that the two of us have found each other—really delighted.” He started on the skillet, and with his sleeves rolled up I could see the stark line of his tan. When his shirt was off he was just as pale below his collar.

“Even when Mum was in the depths of misery, she wanted joy for others.”

Near me, balancing on the shelves of the cupboard, was his calendar with June’s bull; I noticed it was a gift from the Artificial Insemination Specialists.

“I think she’d want me to have a family—no, no, I know that.”

It was perverse, but studying the picture I suddenly remembered this man’s semen running down the inside of my thighs—I had to get upstairs and hide my contraceptive pills. There were another ten days left on the foil, and what if he tried to flush them away? Was Alexander’s showing me the farm, his kingdom, the warm-up for an Old Testament–type story about a man who needs to beget a workforce of sons?

“Liese.” He knew I’d drifted off. “As I said, I’ve done my homework about your trade, and I know to you I must have sometimes seemed just as bad as the rest of the johns. You must have felt, Oh, here comes another one trying to exploit me.”

I stared at him. “But I
chose
this.”

He placed the skillet on the drying rack, his expression one of simple bewilderment. “You might tell yourself that to maintain some self-respect, but how could you? How could you choose to be an object that’s bought and sold? A slave might to some extent give consent, but that’s because she doesn’t realize she has an alternative. She doesn’t
have
to allow strangers to grunt away on top of her.”

Alexander’s logic froze me.

“I mean, I imagine it’s very humiliating to admit that you’re a victim. And hard for someone like you to face the facts of your”—he opted for frankness—“your abuse. Especially if it’s been long-term. And so to hold on to any pride you prop yourself up with nonsense words such as ‘choice’ and ‘agency.’ ”

Behind him the window frames made neat squares out of darkness.

“How will
you
stop abusing me?” I asked quietly.

“I’ll marry you,” he answered. “As soon as possible.”

 • • • 

Lying in the narrow bed, I felt like I’d been buried. The house was wheezing, making strangely human noises. The glass panes of the window rattled, then there was silence.

No one knows where I am.

Pictures from the tiny towns we’d skirted kept running through my head: a shop with the windows boarded over, a gray stone church deserted on a hill, and then the land flattening to paddocks of sheep and cattle until the dense bush of the national park.

He thinks he can do what he likes with me.

I found the switch on the bedside lamp—a dull glow spread under its shade. My suitcase was waiting, slumped by the door.

Carefully, lest the mattress springs gave me away, I folded back the heavy blankets and climbed out of the bed. I was shivering, wearing a ridiculous lace slip I’d ordered on the Internet when I was supposed to be working. I picked up my case, and laying it on the rosebud bedspread, began quietly to pack my clothes.

This was absurd! Presumably Alexander wanted to purify his desire, not eradicate it. But the whole point of marriage was to cancel out the erotic. It was essentially a contract between two people so as
not
to have to sleep together. Within a few years, I knew—from my recent scouting of other people’s houses—it was finger-paintings on the fridge, a StairMaster exercise machine facing the television. In the master bedroom,
Keeping Families Strong
on one bedside table, and on the other a history of aviation—fight and flight. I had heard of an agreement a French woman signed with her husband, forcing an annulment as soon as he ceased to desire her, but people usually tied the knot so they could
get over
desire, so they weren’t driven mad by it, and could eventually cease copulating altogether.

I thought of my own mother and father—I had to get them both a present before I left the country. There would be something for them at the airport. Kangaroo salt-and-pepper shakers, T-shirts embossed with koalas. Taking this suitcase and the cash in the envelope, I could just go straight there and buy a ticket to Shanghai and fly to my real future, my bright, real future.

It must have been midmorning back in England: my parents would be at home running their own sheltered workshop, my mother writing a list of tasks for my father to keep him out of her sight. He would tidy his tiny garden, then fix some small broken thing out in the shed, glue a handle back onto a milk jug they’d been given as a wedding present—trying to stay out of her way.

My mother had cautioned my younger sister and me at length on the shortcomings of men, but she still wanted us each to find one. When all her friends’ daughters started donning their white dresses and marching, one after the other, down the aisle, she quietly sneered at the farce of it all—the smug bride holding tight to her prize-winner, bovine in his rented morning suit; the bridesmaids, weepy, self-important, envious, the fattest one inevitably chosen to read out the sonnet. But as each village burgher’s daughter was married off—and the same baby toy, now bought in bulk, was sent the following year—my mother made it clear she felt I was crossing some line into freakdom.

Back at home people paired off as if they had prior warning of a flood. So one benefit of leaving the country had been not hearing her sigh each time she reported another girl’s engagement (just the word sounding clammy, claustrophobic: a room no one could enter, a number no one could call). An engagement was the beginning of one long, silent fight that, judging from my parents’ example, could go on for decades.

When my sister became engaged (the ring like a performance indicator: her life was tracking correctly), my mother and I accompanied her to a bridal superstore, to rows and rows of shining, ruched gowns that she hoarded in her changing room. Emerging in them one by one, she stood in the communal fitting area, among the other dozen women in white dresses who each stared stunned into the mirrors, multiplying further.

I watched on, carrying a white wicker shopping basket that held an ivory satin ring cushion trimmed with lace and ribbons (£24.99), and the blue lace garter (£14.35), and the memorial pen set, with dangling heart charms, for the registry signing (£29.50). To decorate the tables, there were mini-champagne-bottle bubble-blowers (£0.69 each), gold heart-sparklers (£0.99 a stick), wedding trivia sets—
What was the first movie [insert bride’s name] and [insert groom’s] saw together?
(£9.95), and, as a party favor for the ladies, “Happily Ever After” Cinderella Carriage candles (£1.95 each), and for the men, “Love Is Blooming” seed packets (£1.25 a pop).

I had not been asked to be a bridesmaid. Did I expect to be? I suppose so. But my sister, who still lived in Norwich, had stayed very close to her group of school friends, who’d all look pretty in the same way for the photographs. I also knew she thought I wasn’t taking her big day seriously enough; in fact, I was taking it as seriously as my hurt allowed.

The day before the wedding my father glued little white satin rosebuds onto the place cards; then, as the artistic one, I wrote the guests’ names in calligraphy copied from a book. When I suggested that the cards would be more elegant without the roses, my sister called me a snob.

That night, the four of us—my parents and sister and me—sat in the lounge room on the couch and its matching recliners, my mother’s framed posters of Renoir’s bosomy market girls on the walls around us, all of us eating off the plates we’d always eaten off, my parents’ wedding china, holding a kind of vigil. We were trying to be jolly, but each of us resented the other three for making us who we were. I knew my sister actually believed that by marrying she would stage an escape, and she retreated early to the room that had once been hers, hoping to get this night over with.

The reception was in a Jacobean stately home, ten miles away. Guests drank champagne in a room with a dusty velvet rope around the walls, while outside, the bridal party was documented in the parterre gardens, then next to an ornamental lake, then playing croquet, my sister with satin wedding horseshoes around her wrist like some smith of kitsch; Lord and Lady Poor-Now watching from their private wing, chortling.

In the family portrait I am wearing a charcoal Helmut Lang dress, which, my sister claimed, made me resemble a jagged rain cloud. My mother’s face is streaked with tears, and my father blushes from high feeling. My brother-in-law—in a lavender bow tie to match the bridesmaids’ dresses—has a wide fixed grin; his new wife’s determined happiness is creating a slipstream meant to pull everyone along after her.