The First Bad Man

  When I opened the door she was right there, about to come in.

  I was so startled that for a moment I forgot it was a game. I walked past her to the kitchen, dripping faucet, must turn off. She was right behind me. The moment I was through the door she pressed me against the kitchen wall, same as the first time. The pressure began, my bones panicked, and then a kind of rhythm began to hum in my veins, something like a waltz—so I waltzed. I butterflied her elbows and they bent reflexively. I slid along the wall, using it for balance as I tried to bang her head against it. When I started to can-can she threw me down to the ground face-first, pinning me easily with her knee. Last time she’d been holding back—that was obvious now. Something huge was grinding into my spine and I couldn’t keep from screaming, an ugly little noise that stayed in the air. I tried to get my arms under me and push up but she bore down with her upper body, her hard skull against mine.

  “You’re not allowed in the store,” she hissed, her lips against my ear. “I’m there so I don’t have to look at you.”

  I gathered all my strength and tried to roll her off with a guttural bellow. She watched me, unmoving. I gave up. And just when my back began to spark into flames, the endorphins arrived, just like last time but stronger. My throat was a warm easy puddle; my face against the floor felt cold and wonderful. An immensely satisfying adult game, just as Ruth-Anne had said. Looking sideways I could just see the tips of her lowered eyelashes and the top of her upper lip, dotted with sweat and panting. She probably thought I couldn’t see her. It was almost poignant to me, this moment we were in, although there was something excruciating about it—or maybe the pain radiating out of my back was excruciating, or maybe that was what I meant by poignant: painful. She slowly rolled off me, I quietly whimpered with relief. Instead of rushing to the bathroom she just lay there, catching her breath, our shoulders lightly touching. The floor spun lazily, my arms and legs trilled and quivered. Was she feeling this too? Minutes passed kaleidoscopically, then, very gradually, the kitchen reconstituted itself, the counters, the sink, up there. As Clee shifted and began moving to her feet, a ridiculous wave of abandonment washed over me. Her blank, dumb face headed to the door. And then, at the last possible moment, her eyes flicked back and met mine. I quickly rose to my elbows, readying myself for a question, but she was already gone.

  I WAS SO EXCITED TO see Ruth-Anne that I arrived fifteen minutes early. I cleaned out my car then I browsed the gift shop in the lobby of her building. It smelled like vitamins and was overly warm. A very pregnant Indian woman was inspecting elfin figurines. I turned a spinning rack of reading glasses until I was certain, then I stood discreetly beside her, picking up a skiing elf. The woman’s stomach protruded so far that its belly button was closer to me than it was to her.

  Kubelko?

  Yes. Am I in you?

  No. You’re in someone else.

  A sad and awkward silence followed. I cast about for some way to express the bereavement I felt every time we came across each other. A text vibrated in my pocket.

  Excuse me.

  SHE STRIPPED FOR ME: SAW HER PUSS AND JUGS. UHHHH. KEPT MY HANDS TO MYSELF. My blessing still reigned. Of course it did. I had to have faith in him. We’d been prehistoric together, medieval, king and queen—now we were this. It was all part of the answer to his question What keeps us coming back? He wasn’t done with me, and I wasn’t done with him. And the details—the text messages—were just riddles from the universe. Clues. When I turned back to Kubelko the pregnant woman was gone.

  RUTH-ANNE’S COUCH WAS WARM from her previous patient and she looked flushed and radiant.

  “Good session?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You look happy.”

  “Oh,” she said, dimming a little. “I just had my lunch hour—I took a catnap. How are you?”

  So the heat of the couch was hers. I pressed the leather with my fingers and tried to think of how to begin.

  “The thing you do with Dr. Broyard, that—what did you call it?”

  “Roles? An adult game?”

  “Right. Would you say that’s unusual?”

  “Define unusual.”

  “Well, how common would you say it is?”

  “I’d say it’s more common than you would think.”

  I told her what had happened—starting with what Michelle said and ending on the kitchen floor.

  “And my globus is gone, still! I don’t know if you can tell”—I leaned forward and gulped—“but it’s much easier to swallow. I owe it all to you, Ruth-Anne.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a box.

  Sometimes people say thank you before even opening the gift—thank you for thinking of me. Ruth-Anne didn’t do that; she glanced at her watch while brusquely pulling off the wrapping paper. It was a soy candle. Not the little kind, but a column in a glass jar with a wooden lid.

  “It’s pomegranate currant,” I said.

  She handed the candle back to me without smelling it.

  “I don’t think this is for me.”

  “It is! I just bought it.” I pointed down, indicating the shop on the ground floor.

  She nodded, waiting.

  “Who do you think it’s for?” I said, finally.

  “Who do you think it’s for?”

  “Besides you?”

  She nodded by slowly shutting her eyes and opening them again. I held the candle nervously, like a hot potato.

  “My parents?”

  “Why your parents?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought because this was therapy that might be the right answer.”

  “Who might you want to give a candle to? Candle, flame, light . . . illumination . . .”

  “. . . wick . . . wax . . . soy . . . ”

  “Who? Think.”

  “Clee?”

  “That’s interesting. Why Clee?”

  “That was right? Clee?”

  THE WRAPPING PAPER WAS STILL good so I just retaped it. When Clee was in the bathroom I put it on her pillow but it rolled off with a bang; she came in just as I was reaching under the coffee table. I hadn’t wanted to hand it to her in person.

  “Here.” I put the heavy cylinder in her hand. The fragrance was abundant and nothing like pomegranates or currants, neither of which is famous for its smell. It was so obviously a candle, the very dumbest present you could give a person. Clee undid the tape and she smelled it cautiously. She read the label. Finally she said, “Thank you.” I said, “You’re welcome.” It was horrible and there was no way to undo it.

  I locked myself in the ironing room and wrote a long-overdue e-mail to the entire staff about recycling, overpopulation, and oil, then I toned it down a little, then I deleted it. The shower turned on. She was taking a shower. I called Jim and we talked about the warehouse staff.

  “Kristof is lobbying for a basketball hoop,” he said.

  “We tried that once and no one got any work done.” I hoped he’d keep pushing for the hoop so I could be really emphatic, but he dropped it. His wife was waiting for him; he had to go.

  “How is Gina?”

  But he really had to go.

  It was dusk when I came out of the ironing room. She was sitting on the edge of the couch, knees wide apart. Her wet hair was combed back, a towel hung around her neck; a boxer is what she looked like. Her hands were interlaced in front of her and she was staring past them with a furrowed brow. The TV was off. She was waiting for me.

  I’d never really sat in my armchair before. It wasn’t comfortable.

  She ducked her head, acknowledging my arrival to the meeting, and made a sound in her throat as if she was pulling up phlegm.

  “I may have given off the wrong . . .”—she searched for the word—“impression.”

  She glanced at me, to make sure I was familiar with the word. I nodded. r />
  “I appreciate the gift but I’m not . . . you know. I’m into dick.” She coughed huskily and spit into one of the empty Pepsi bottles on the coffee table.

  “We’re in the same boat, as far as that goes,” I said. I saw us in a little dinghy together, liking dick on the big dark sea.

  “For me it’s a little more intense.” She was bouncing her knee unconsciously. “I guess I’m ‘misogynist’ or whatever.”

  I’d never heard the word used like this, like an orientation.

  “I’ll stop if you want,” she said, looking abstractly into the distance. At first I thought she meant talking, stop talking. She didn’t mean that.

  “Do you want to?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Stop.”

  She shrugged, utterly indifferent. It was probably the meanest thing she’d done yet. Then she shrugged again, exactly the same, but added “No” afterward, like that’s what she’d been saying the first time. No, she didn’t want to stop attacking me.

  I felt a little winded, a little light-headed. We were making an agreement; this was real. I gave her a shy glance and realized she was fixated on a repulsive cluster of purple spider veins on my exposed calf. A shiver shuddered through me—she was attached to the super-special angry feeling I gave her.

  “Do you want to make a contract?” I murmured, completely inaudibly.

  “Make what?”

  “A contract that says what we want to do and don’t want to do. We can download one from the Internet.” I said this too loudly, as if she was deaf.

  She blinked a few times. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about, but I’m not interested in that kind of thing.” She pressed her knuckles to her forehead and then dropped her hand suddenly, with a surprising exasperation. “Have you done this before? With the contracts and all that?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “A friend told me about it.”

  “You’re talking about this with people?” Her knee was bouncing frantically.

  “Not a friend. A therapist. It’s completely confidential.”

  Her anguish seemed to level out. She was gazing at the remote control from afar. I handed it to her and she brushed her fingers over the rubber buttons a couple times.

  “Is there anything else we need to . . . ?”

  “I think we pretty much covered everything,” I said, trying to remember what had been established. She nodded gruffly and turned on the TV.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It wasn’t obvious how or why to fight, now that we had formally agreed to. A few times she seemed to be about to start something and then she’d change her mind. And obviously I couldn’t initiate—that would be perverse. The whole thing, if it was a thing, made less and less sense as the days went by, and became more and more embarrassing. I began going to the office as much as possible, yelling, “Informal visit!” as I entered so I wouldn’t violate my work-at-home status. Carl gave me some Thai hot sauce to give to Clee. “Have you eaten spicy food with her yet? You have? Isn’t she something else?” I nodded mutely and left the bottle in the trunk of my car.

  The next morning Clee was in the kitchen when I needed to be in the kitchen and thus we were both in the kitchen at the same time. The air was taut. She dropped a lid and stiffly picked it up again. I coughed and said, “Excuse me.” This was ridiculous; it was time to annul the agreement and move on.

  “Listen,” I said, “neither of us—”

  “Go like this,” she interrupted, holding her hand over the right side of her face. I mirrored her, squinting in case there was a slap or a punch coming.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “One half of your face is way older and uglier than the other half. The pores are all big and it’s like your eyelid is starting to fall into your eye. I’m not saying the other side looks good, but if both sides were like your left side people would think you were seventy.”

  I put my hand down. No one had ever talked to me like this before, so cruelly. And yet so attentively. My eyelid was starting to fall into my eye. My left side had always been uglier. Some real thought had gone into this little speech—it wasn’t just careless hostility. I looked up at her overly plucked eyebrows and wondered if I could throw some words together about the crass ignorance of her own face and then I saw her hands; they were rubbing the fuzzy legs of her pants with great agitation and her mouth was hanging open. This humiliating little ode had gotten her revved up, she was yearning to strike, and as she registered the fear in my face her body seemed to load itself, to wind up. My forearm deflected her hand with a loud smack.

  I ENTERED OPEN PALM WITH big bouncing moon steps, saying, “Hello hello hello!” Our first tussle under the new agreement had been long and dirty and had taken us into all the rooms of the house. I can-canned and popped, not just to defend myself but out of real anger, first at her and then at people like her, dumb people. I popped her for being young without humility, when I had had so much humility at her age—too much. I bit and almost broke the skin on her forearm. When she shoved me against my own desk I head-butted her and everyone else who wasn’t capable of understanding how nuanced I was. She assaulted me as only a person born to a lifetime of martial arts training can. Succinctly. There was not even a second when I thought I was gaining on her. After about thirty-five minutes we took a moment to recover; I drank a glass of water. When we started up again my skin was tender, bruises were already forming, and every muscle was shaking. It was nice, deeper and more focused. I felt my face contorting with a wrath I didn’t recognize; it seemed out of scale for my species. This was the opposite of getting mugged. I’d been mugged every single day of my life and this was the first day I wasn’t mugged. At the end she quickly squeezed my hand twice: good game.

  I swished through meetings with a secret, raw, achy feeling that made me lighthearted and hilarious; everyone thought so. Organizing the annual fundraiser for Kick It was usually so stressful that I just clawed through, hurting feelings right and left. But everything was different now—when Jim stupidly suggested a live musical act instead of a DJ, I said, “That’s interesting!” and let it sit. Then later I circled back and asked a few gentle questions that inspired him to change his mind. Then I said, “Are you sure? It sounded like such a fun idea,” and I pretended to play invisible maracas, which was actually taking my new way a tad too far. But this, something in the ballpark of this, was who I really was. When I laughed it was the low chuckle of a wise person, no hysteria, no panic.

  But how long would it last? By lunch my limbs had stopped pulsing; she was too skilled to ever really hurt me. At the end of the day I sat in the bathroom stall and swallowed experimentally—my globus wasn’t back yet, but the levity, was it still there? I tightened my shoulders and bowed my head, coaxing anxieties to the surface. The chaotic mess of the house . . . really not that big a deal! Phillip? He wanted my blessing—mine! Kubelko Bondy? My eyes fell on the gray linoleum floor and I wondered how many other women had sat on this toilet and stared at this floor. Each of them the center of their own world, all of them yearning for someone to put their love into so they could see their love, see that they had it. Oh, Kubelko, my boy, it’s been so long since I held you. I lowered my elbows to my knees and dropped my heavy head into my palms.

  So it was nice to be apart, to quiver in the afterglow, but after the afterglow it was time to fight again. Now that the globus had softened, I had a new awareness of my whole body. It was rigid and jumpy and not that fun to be in; I’d never noticed because I’d never had anything to compare it to. That week we did it every morning before she went to work. On Saturday we did it and then I went right out; once I felt loose and tingly, I didn’t really want to be around her anymore—we had nothing to say to each other. I bought a persimmon-colored blouse that I could picture Phillip loving and wore it right out of the store. I got my hair trimmed. I flitted around the city either turning
heads or else walking by heads just as they were turning. I ate a pastry made out of white flour and refined sugar and watched the couple next to me feed each other bites of omelet. It was hard to believe they played adult games but most likely they did, probably with their coworkers or relatives. What were other people’s like? Perhaps some mothers and fathers pretended to be their children’s children and made messes. Or a widow might sometimes become her own deceased husband and demand retribution from everyone. It was all very personal; nobody’s game made any sense to anyone else. I watched seemingly dull men and women zooming past in cars. I doubted they all had written contracts like Ruth-Anne, but some did. Some probably had multiple contracts. Some contracts had been voided or transferred. People were having a good time out here, me included. I waved down the waiter and ordered an expensive juice drink even though there was free water with free refills. Did I still feel loose? Yes. Was it fading? Only a little. I had hours to go.

  It was dark when I pulled into the driveway. She was standing on the porch; I didn’t even have a chance to put my purse down. She slammed the door behind me and pressed down on my shoulders with a leveling force. I buckled, collapsed to my hands and knees, keys clattering to the floor.

  But most nights we didn’t do anything. I cooked, took a bath, read in bed; she talked on the phone, watched TV, heated her frozen meals. We ignored each other with a feeling of fullness and ferment. Phillip texted (KIRSTEN WANTS YOUR PERMISSION TO DO ORAL. ???! NO PRESSURE. STANDING BY UNTIL YOUR GO-AHEAD) and I felt no animosity. Oh, Kirsten. Maybe she was our cat for the past one hundred thousand lifetimes, always on the bed, pawing around in the covers, watching us. Congratulations, kitty, you’re the girlfriend this time—but I’m still in charge. I felt limber and generous. Phillip was working through something—that’s how I might put it to a close friend, in confidence. I’d permitted him to have an affair with a younger woman.

  You’re so brave, you have such faith.