The Stars Are Fire(68)

“Come on, Grace, give your hubby a kiss.” He swoops again and catches her eye this time. He doesn’t have another hand with which to overpower her. Does he really imagine that she will somehow help him to have sex with her?

“Just a little kiss,” he persists. He grabs the back of her hair to hold her head to the wall. “We can start over again,” he coos, “wipe away the past.”

“Gene, stop. You’ll fall.”

“But you’ll catch me, won’t you, Dove?”

The old nickname, the one she hasn’t heard in over a year, fails to move her. She slides out of his grasp and away from him. “Gene, you have to go downstairs. The children are right through this wall.”

“You should be good to me. I’m your husband.”

“Let me take you downstairs. We can lie in your bed. The children won’t hear,” she explains. “You don’t want the children to hear us, do you?”

“You’ll help me?”

“Of course I’ll help you.”

“You love me, don’t you?” he asks, sounding oddly like a child.

She switches the light on. “Let’s just concentrate on getting you down the stairs. You shouldn’t have come this far.”

“I had to rest on my mother’s bed,” he says, squinting in the electric light.

What time is it? she wonders. How long did it take him to get to the third floor? They make the turn on the landing and descend. Trying not to hurry him, she walks with him to his bedroom.

“Here,” she says, “let’s get you settled, and then I’ll come around and slide in with you.”

“And you’ll let me kiss you then?” he asks, catching her hand.

“I will,” she answers, slipping her fingers through his.

A man has sexual needs. She is his wife. She uncovers the bed and lies next to Gene. He has lowered his pajamas to expose his rigid penis. “Just touch it,” he says.

There will be no discussion, no loving words. She takes hold of him, makes an open fist and slides it back and forth. He moans. In less than a minute, he jerks and his sperm spills out over her palm and wrist and sheet. He makes the same involuntary motions she sometimes feels inside her when he has finished. She wipes her palm and arm on her side of the bed and stares at her husband.

He is spent, nearly unconscious. Any woman’s hand would have done. She hates that she had to touch him, that the sexual urge turned a frightful and nasty man into a wheedling beggar. She hates that he can ask her for this.

No, she was wrong. It wasn’t that any woman’s hand would have done—it has to be her hand. His demand and her hand.

He doesn’t touch her. He doesn’t call her Dove. He gives no indication that she is even in the same room with him.

She slides out of bed and walks to the stairs. Once there, she takes them two at a time to the third floor. Inside the room, she reaches high on the door for the bolt. She slams it home and leans against the wall. She presses her hand against her breast and can feel her heart hammering. She slides down the wall and sits with her back against it until morning.


Grace is careful to deliver Gene’s breakfast before he can get up and come into the kitchen. He wakes in a fog. She doesn’t give him a chance to mention the night before.


Back in the kitchen, Grace collapses onto a chair, paralyzed with indecision. Her thoughts swirl like ribbons inside her head. Trying to catch one to examine seems like a game too difficult for her. If only she could think logically.

Claire in her pj’s stands at the threshold to the kitchen. “What. Is. Going. On?” she demands in a loud voice, hands on her hips.

Aping her father.

“Where’s our breakfast?” she scolds. She turns her hands into little fists and pops them back on her hips. Behind her, Tom studies his fingers, trying to make fists, too. Giving up, he slaps the sides of his diaper.

Claire misses nothing.


At lunchtime, Grace finds Gene propped up against the sofa in the sitting room. She sets his meal, pieces of chicken breast, potato chips, and a pickle, on a side table that he can easily reach.

“I could drag you through divorce court,” Gene says, as if he had absorbed her thoughts in his sleep. “It would destroy you.” He nearly laughs. “Can you imagine what your mother would think? Her friends?” he adds, looking smug.

“Please,” she says.

The word might mean “please don’t do that” or it might mean “please divorce me.” She decides to let Gene figure it out for himself.


An early summer day, and it will be hot. Already Grace can feel, at eight o’clock in the morning, as she passes from the shade of one tree to another, the surprise of the heat wafting up from the grass. She blows up a wading pool she recently purchased and then stands with the hose in her hand, filling it. Nearby, Tom and Claire, in their new bathing suits, hop about in anticipation. Grace has made the decision to keep the children with her at all times. She wouldn’t put it past Gene to snatch one of them and use Claire or Tom as a hostage. Merely the idea of it sickens her.

How did Gene make it to the third floor? He can stand and walk, but he can’t sit up straight. He must have two-stepped to the top of the house, keeping his left leg and side straight. Is that how he descended? She remembers it seemed to take forever.