What You Don't Know(61)

*

Marriage, she thinks, is a careful balancing act. If you put too much weight on one side, lose your focus, everything falls.

“Don’t touch me,” she tells Jacky. It’s been nearly six months since the miscarriage, but she doesn’t want to try again. She’s careful—sleeps fully clothed, always goes to bed before Jacky, quickly moves out of the way when she feels him getting close.

“I need you,” he says. She found a magazine under his side of the bed not long before, where it had dropped after he fell asleep. On the cover was a photo of a woman, naked and tied, a black rubber ball jammed into her mouth. The woman—and every other woman in the magazine, all tied up and being whipped or pinched or hurt in some way—looked terrified.

“I’m not feeling well right now.” She didn’t say anything to Jacky about the magazine—she’d been finding things like that for a while now, surprises he’d left behind. It was like finding a big green booger wiped on the bottom of a chair, she’d thought the first time. A nasty, crusty thing that had been left behind, and it was worse because it was Jacky doing it, it was her husband doing those disgusting things. “I need to go to sleep.”

She turns over in the bed, tucking her hand under her cheek, but Jacky isn’t letting her off this time. He grabs her shoulder, pins her back on the mattress. A hank of her hair gets caught in his watchband and rips right out of her scalp, making her shriek in surprise.

“What are you doing?” she says, but he’s busy, working on the drawstring of his pajama bottoms with one hand and holding her down with the other. “Let me go.”

She pushes at him, tries to fight him off, but Jacky’s stronger than she is, and his arms are longer. When she manages to sink her nails into the meat of his cheek he slaps her, hard, and she puts her hands over her face and cries, sucking in air so hard she can hear it wheezing through the cracks in her fingers.

“Let me see your face,” Jacky says, grabbing at her wrists and trying to pull her hands away, his hips not slowing down, and she realizes that this is turning him on, that she’s like one of those girls in the magazine, she’s scared and crying and trying to get away, and Jacky doesn’t just like it, he loves it. She doesn’t let him pull her hands away, even when he pinches her, taking flesh in between his fingers and squeezing until the skin squirts out of his grip and she screams, but she doesn’t lower her hands. “I want to see your face.”

*

Jacky doesn’t wake her up when he leaves for work the next morning, so it’s almost noon before she gets up, smeary-eyed and groggy. She slept like the dead, but she’s still exhausted. She pads into the kitchen, turns on the coffee machine, and watches it slowly drip into the pot, not noticing that her robe is untied and open, and that she’s naked beneath, or that she’s swiveling her hips back and forth, tufts of her pubic hair skimming the lip of the counter. And she certainly doesn’t notice the dried blood on her thighs.

She thinks her husband might’ve raped her. Or not. Can that even happen? She’s not sure.

She slops the coffee over the mug’s rim when she pours, burning the back of her hand. She could leave Jacky. Ask for a divorce. Those things happen. She doesn’t know any women who’ve actually left their husbands, but she’s seen it on TV, knows it’s possible. All day she thinks about this, about leaving, and she gets a suitcase out of the hallway closet and puts a few things in—just some panties and blouses, a few pairs of slacks. If she packed all her clothes, she thinks, that means she’d made up her mind, that she was ready to go.

But she’s still not sure.

Later that night, when she’s sitting across from Jacky at the dinner table, watching him shovel food in his mouth, she decides she has to say something. That’s what women are supposed to do, aren’t they? Speak their minds? Get their feelings out in the open? She thinks she might’ve read that tidbit of wisdom in a magazine somewhere—probably in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. Clear the air, it said. Work things out. Or be a modern woman, and leave. She didn’t need a man who’d treat her badly, the magazine had said.

“About last night—” she starts, but Jacky won’t let her finish, because he suddenly has an awful lot to say, even though he hasn’t said a word since sitting down.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” he says quickly, standing up and coming around the table to her. She flinches away when he tries to hold her, and she sees the pain in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. We haven’t been together for so long, and I’ve been wanting you so badly.”

I guess he does it because he loves me so much, her mother had said.

“I’ll move into the guest room until I find somewhere else to live,” he says. “I won’t touch you again.”

“I don’t want you to do that,” Gloria says. This is not going the way she thought it would, not at all. It’s one thing if she plans on divorcing him, but it’s something completely different if he’s trying to leave her. How could he do this? He’s in the wrong, after all. Isn’t he? Isn’t he?

“I don’t think you’re attracted to me anymore,” Jacky says. He looks ready to cry. “If there’s something wrong with me, if you don’t want to be with me, I understand. There’re a lot of men out there—”