I stopped reading there and put the box back in the closet. I didn’t know what most of it meant, and I decided I didn’t want to know more than I already did. I felt like I’d betrayed him by reading what some shrink had written about him.
Sudden Interest
Meda turned up her nose at me when I got home from work and said, “I didn’t know being a librarian involved manual labor.”
“I’m moving a lot of books and shelves.” Taking the hint, I went into the bathroom to shower. She followed me and watched me take off my shoes, socks and shirt.
“Isn’t it hard to move that stuff, you know, with your chest muscle like that?” she said, her gaze settling on the scar.
“Not really, but I have a hard time lifting things over my head. Why the sudden interest?”
“It’s not a sudden interest. What do you want for dinner? I could make some spaghetti.”
“We can go out or order something in. I didn’t bring you here to make you cook for me.” I reached out with the intention of closing the bathroom door, but she stayed put. I turned on the shower and finally took off my jeans and shorts.
“What did you bring me here for?”
“To see you. I wanted to see you,” I said.
“I thought you brought me here to be your captive love slave,” she suggested, which I ignored. “Aren’t you going to sing?”
“I’m trying to take a shower. This isn’t a concert.”
She sat down on the toilet lid and looked at me expectantly.
“I like to hear you sing. Sing that Tom Jones song I like.”
Dissociative Identity Disorder
Meda
“Dissociative Identity Disorder,” I said while we were eating dinner, because I wanted to ask before I forgot it. Bernie grunted. “Most people don’t have their medical files at home. Shouldn’t they be in a doctor’s office or something?”
“I stole them.” That was all he said for a while. Then he looked up and saw me waiting for him to finish. “Graduation day, there was so much going on, I walked into the counselor’s office with a tire iron and broke open his filing cabinet.”
“How’s your spaghetti?”
He gave me a strange look, then looked down at his food and said, “Is this the part where you explain why you can’t marry me?”
“Because you don’t like my cooking?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s fine.” He took another bite and said, “You read the files, didn’t you? Isn’t that what you wanted, to know how crazy I am?”
“I didn’t want to read all that. And I don’t read that fast. I just saw that, Dissociative Identity Disorder.”
“Is that crazy enough for you?”
“I don’t even know what it means.”
“It means I’m not all there. I do things I don’t remember later. You know, my elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top.”
“Like when you get that funny look on your face and your eyes aren’t really focusing on anything and I have to touch you to bring you back.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you’re a real space cadet sometimes.”
“Space cadet?” He looked worried, like he was waiting for me to say something else.
Hair Worth Marrying
After dinner we played Candy Land, which developed some suspiciously mutable rules that helped Annadore win. Once Annadore was in bed, Meda and I played a different game with equally suspect rules. Meda complained that her feet hurt, so I rubbed her feet. Then she said her back hurt, so I massaged that, too, trying not to think about her flesh. She went to the bathroom and came back with a bottle of lotion.
“My skin is so dry. Would you mind putting some lotion on my back?” she said.
I didn’t mind, but once she’d unbuttoned her nightgown far enough to slide it off her shoulders, I was beginning to think her requests were not completely innocent. There was no need for false modesty, but having her half naked on the sofa made me nervous. I could see the vague outline of where her bra had cut into her during the day. It squeezed her so tightly, leaving a little roll of skin above and below the band that went around her ribs. I found that excess of her so inviting that I lingered over the places it rested when she was braless.
When I reached the end my tether, I put the lotion on the coffee table and said, “There. Is that better?”
“Much,” she murmured and pulled her nightgown back up. After a few moments, she leaned against me, looking at the TV. I’d been watching a show on Civil War era shipwrecks while she got Annadore ready for bed, but it was over and there was a show about lions on.
“Can I put my head in your lap?” Meda said.
She didn’t wait for a response before she rested her cheek on my erection and gave a little sigh. Curling her legs up, she snuggled against me and settled her headrest so deliberately I almost begged for mercy. I might have made it, if it hadn’t been for that lion show. I was holding my own until those stupid lions started mating. Meda giggled, watching the lion sink his teeth into the back of the lioness’ neck, and when I ignored that, she made a purring, growling noise and dug her little claws into my leg, slightly south of the source of my problem.
“That’s not fair,” I said, and stood up to dump her out of my lap.
“What’s not fair?”
“You made me promise that I wouldn’t talk about our relationship, but you’re, you’re—”
“I’m what?” She was kneeling on the sofa looking up at me innocently, the blush rising on her cheeks, her lips slightly parted. She hadn’t buttoned her nightgown all the way, providing me with a resolve-weakening view of her breasts.
“You’re either trying to seduce me or you’re purposefully tormenting me.”
“I’m not tormenting you.”
“What do you call this? ‘Will you rub lotion on my back? Can I rest my head on your lap?’ Come on.” I was starting to get angry with her.
“I said I’m not tormenting you.” She looked annoyed, and I backtracked, retracing what I’d said, remembering how I’d phrased my accusation.
“You’re trying to seduce me?”
“Took you long enough to figure that out,” she said.
“That’s not really fair, either, if I have to follow your rule.”
“Does that mean we can’t have sex unless we talk about getting married?’
“Am I supposed to do the one without the other?”
“That’s what got us in this situation, from what I remember. Besides, why else did you put Annadore’s bed in the other bedroom?” Meda pulled her hair down out of its ponytail and reached for the fly of my jeans. It was an argument I couldn’t win, and it left me feeling defeated. I was going to cave in and be that asshole, the one with the pregnant girlfriend.
Despite her protests, I made her leave the light on in the bedroom, and she was so real to me that I was almost there for it all. Afterwards, she pulled the covers up over us and said, “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“I love you,” I said quietly, hoping to slip it in under the radar.
“Well, I love you, too.” She made it sound like an insult. When I got up to go sleep on the sofa, she exerted her womanly wiles on me to try to get me to stay with her, but eventually I escaped.
The next morning, Meda had one foot up on the toilet seat, rubbing lotion on her leg, while I shaved. She was thinking her innumerable mysterious thoughts, perhaps plotting new ways to torment me. Having finished with her legs, she began to rub her belly with slow steady strokes, using both hands in concentric circles. In the mirror I watched her hands go around and around. I managed to shave without slitting my throat and began the daunting work of making my hair lie down properly.
“That hair, that’s the reason,” she said.
“It’s the reason for what?” I wished I didn’t have to ask. I loved her. I desired her. I feared her. I wanted to fuck the will to argue out of her.
“That hair is the reason I can’t marry you.”
“I know
you don’t mean it, but for the sake of argument, I’ll ask: Are you saying, if I stop combing my hair like this, you’ll marry me?” There was no amount of fucking in the world that would stop her, but I was willing to try. Her hands had traveled up from her belly and were separately describing rapturous rings around her breasts.
“No, I’m saying the hair is all about how everything in your life is organized in these boxes with labels, how everything has to fit in a certain place. I’d marry you, if you could stop wanting to comb your hair like that,” she said, adding more lotion to herself.
I wanted to explain to her that the organizing, the labeling of everything was necessary to keep my internal chaos at bay. Instead I threw the comb into the trash can and ran both hands through my hair five or six times, in opposite directions. She laughed and turned around to present her back to me. I ignored the bottle of lotion she offered me over her shoulder and put my arms around her.
While moving books that day, I thought about what it would be like to have an actual love slave, because Meda was no one’s captive love slave. I might come home and find her reading, or playing with Annadore or cooking dinner and it was all delightfully domestic, but I knew it was mere chance. There were a million other chaotic and stubborn moments that she would also be in.
I came home that very evening to a less blissful domestic scene, with Annadore crying and Meda saying, “Well, I don’t like you very much right now, either.” When I asked what the problem was, Meda showed me where Annadore had drawn on the wall.
“It’s okay. It can be painted over,” I said.
“Of course it can be painted over, but that’s not the point. She made a little scribble and I told her to quit, but as soon as my back was turned she did that.” Meda crossed her arms across her chest and dared me to stand up for Annadore.
“Oh,” was all I said, so Annadore was banished to her room until dinner. My punishment was two hours on the phone with Celeste to take care of foundation business, and some lingering issues with my grandfather’s estate. It didn’t say much for my earlier productivity that I was capable of keeping up with my other life in fewer than ten hours a week. Soon enough, when the board of directors was up to speed and ready to start receiving applications for grants, the foundation would require more of my time, but right then it was a part time job.
When dinner was ready, Annadore was allowed to come back out, and she carried herself with all the elegant, wounded dignity of her mother.
“Scrambled eggs?” she said.
“No,” Meda said. “You can have what we’re having for dinner.”
“Scrambled eggs, Bunny?”
Meda was right about the burdens of parenthood. At three, Annadore already knew enough to play us off each other. Expecting the worse, Meda looked at me.
“No, Annadore. You can eat what we’re having.” I said it as nicely as I could, and Meda visibly relaxed.
After dinner, after Annadore was in bed, after Meda had presented herself for massaging and moisturizing, after she had been satisfied and I had come as close as I dared, I was feeling a little triumphant.
“I didn’t comb my hair all day.”
“Yeah,” she whispered against my neck, “but you still want to comb your hair like that.”
“That’s not fair. That kind of test isn’t fair.”
“You keep complaining that this or that isn’t fair. Not everything is fair. I thought you knew that.”
“I think that people ought to try to be fair to each other when they’re in a relationship together. I feel like you’re making a joke.”
“It isn’t a joke. You and your hair are all about the things that make me afraid to marry you. You’ve got everything so organized inside of yourself like you’re a closet. If there’s something that’s bothering you, you just put it in a box and put a label on it. Your aunt was right that you’re an observer. I think that’s why it’s so hard for you to have an orgasm. It exposes you and it doesn’t fit into your filing system,” she said, but it was surprisingly free of judgment.
“How will you know when I stop wanting to comb my hair like that? How will you know?” That was the part of the conversation I felt I could get a handle on.
“I’ll know,” she said.
The next morning, when I got out of the shower, I spent about a minute looking at my messy hair. Meda’s brush lay like a rebuke on the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet. She’d made herself at home. She’d also broken her own rule, which meant I was free to say whatever I wanted on the topic of marriage.
It was an uphill battle, because Meda had plenty of resources to resist the topic, sex being the foremost among them. Because I didn’t stand a chance in any arena where she could strip and get me into bed, I took her and Annadore out of the house on the weekend. We went to the Nelson-Atkins, and destroyed a lot of men’s peace of mind. Meda had a new black leather jacket, and a pair of matching knee-high boots, sexy and practical. To go with it, she wore a cute little dress that bared her knees above the boots and revealed quite a bit of cleavage. It can’t possibly be right to look at a pregnant woman and think what I was thinking, but it wasn’t just me. Everywhere Meda went, men had to reassess their ideas about it.
She was utterly charming and delightful, and herself. She admired Sargent’s Mrs. Cecil Wade, and stood in awed silence before the enormous Bodhisattva Guanyin that the Nelson has in a latticed enclosure like a temple. She smiled with pleasure at the lovely and diminutive Amarna Princess statue, and ooohed over the sparkling light in Frederic Church’s Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives. She also walked by Willem de Kooning’s Woman IV, and said, “That’s crap. Annadore can do better than that.”
In the midst of her charm and delightfulness, I found that we didn’t manage to talk about any of the things I wanted to. She made it impossible for me to stay focused. She made me do things I said I’d never do.
I’ve always been privately appalled by the sexual position people call ‘doggy style,’ and the fact that she was pregnant made it even more appalling. It was dirty and I did it anyway, because she said to.
“Harder,” she said in the middle of it. “Harder, Bernie.” I was worried if I did it any harder I was going to crack her skull on the headboard. She’d said it was okay, that I wasn’t going to hurt her or the baby, but when she began making the sound, I was afraid I was hurting her. Instead of pulling away from me, she dug her fingers into the sheets, straightened her elbows and pushed back against me. The sound she made obliterated whatever place I’d gone to. It was a wail, low in her throat, that grew louder and was punctuated by every thrust, and I felt like a trap door had swung open under me.
The Dead
Meda
I let him fall asleep partly out of carelessness, but mostly from the pleasure of lying there next to him drifting off, and feeling happy. I wanted him to be able to sleep with me, and I figured there wasn’t any way for him to get used to it unless he just did it. His hair was soaked with sweat and his head seemed like it weighed about twenty pounds on my shoulder, but he settled into me a little bit at a time until I thought it would be okay. I don’t know what happened when he woke up, because I was asleep, but what woke me up was the sound of him crashing into the dresser. He was down on his hands and knees between the bed and the dresser and I said his name a couple of times, but I don’t think he knew I was there.
He put his hands on the edge of the dresser like he was going to get up, but he was shaking so hard the whole dresser rattled. The dresser mirror was broken all over the place and I could see where he’d cut himself on it and was bleeding. I was afraid to touch him, because they say you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker. Since he didn’t seem to know I was there, I went to check on Annadore, who had slept through the whole thing. When I came back, Bernie was in the bathroom with the door shut and water running. I swept up all the glass, and when I was done, I knocked on the bathroom door. It scared me that he didn’t answer, but when I opened the door, he was standing at the
sink, brushing his teeth like nothing had happened. I touched his shoulder, but he looked right through me.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
Bernie wasn’t even talking to me, but after he finished brushing, he let me lead him back to bed and clean up the cuts on his hands and knees. I had to pick glass out of his shoulder, where he must have hit the mirror. He didn’t even flinch when I did it.
“What happened, Bernie? Why did you break the mirror?”
“I what?” He looked at me then, saw me, and seemed to know where he was.
“You broke the dresser mirror.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t hurt you, did I? I’m so sorry.”
“No,” I said, maybe not as nice as I could have been. “I don’t want you to apologize. I want you to tell me why you can’t sleep with me. That’s what upset you, isn’t it? That you fell asleep with me?”
Just when I’d started to think he wasn’t going to say anything, he said, “The thing I didn’t know for the longest time, was that Amy was dead.”
“Amy who?”
“She was the girl who worked for us, who helped kidnap me. It wasn’t until later, a lot later, that I found out. I knew she was dead, that he shot her, because it was in all the papers. You can read them on microfilm at the county library. I knew she was dead, but what no one told me was that she was already dead when he shot her. He choked her to death, before he put her in the closet with me. The thing that made me think it would be okay, that I would be safe, it wasn’t real. Her body was still warm. I didn’t know she was dead.”
Bernie kept his head down while he was talking and he was so quiet I had to lean my head close to his to hear him. He let me be that close, but when I put my hand on his arm he shuddered. “When I woke up next to you, I knew you were sleeping. I knew it intellectually, but there was that moment between breaths when you were so still.”
“Bernie, will you remember this in the morning?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you try?” He was so tired, he could barely keep his eyes open. I didn’t know what else to do, so I pulled the covers up over him and turned out the light. I fell asleep on the couch finally, and Bernie must have been very early and quiet, because he snuck away to work without waking me or Annadore up.