The Vanishing Year(81)
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Sunup, sundown, faint lights through the curtains, switch arms, a sponge bath. His hands roam my naked body but he can’t keep it up, so he gives up. More foreign clothing: track suits and gym clothes, baggy and falling off, I’m wasting away. I’d rather just starve to death. That will come faster than three months, surely.
“I got you a present.”
A smaller syringe, a faint yellow liquid.
“It won’t make you sick.” He smiles. This is my present. A drug that will kill me slower. I need to do something.
“Henry, wait. Hal.” I recall the name on the back of the picture. Hal and TJ. My voice is thick, molasses coated, stuck like tar on my tongue. I feel the edge of my dress, a summer garden dress, fit for bridal and baby showers, sweet-smelling perfume, and flutes of champagne. Pizzelles. Where did that come from? I remember my sister’s picture, smiling in front of the library on her college graduation day. A flower dress.
“What?” He stands at the foot of the bed, his fingers tapping against my bare foot impatiently. I struggle to sit up. Between doses, I retain a shocking amount of lucidity. Like the drug doesn’t so much seep from my system as much as it dumps out, the fog lifting like a heavy stage curtain.
“Hal,” I repeat.
“Don’t call me that.” His eyes narrow, his wrist, holding the syringe, flicks.
“Why? Isn’t it what you want?” I inch forward, suddenly sure-footed. Steady. I reach out, the handcuff pulling against my skin like a vise and I touch his arm. It’s warm under my fingertips and I close my eyes, remembering when, not that long ago, I would have made this gesture sincerely. Loving. The flat bones in his wrist are unyielding. He meets my gaze and falters. “Let me try.”
I see him consider this. I see him think about me, in her clothes, reading Ruth Rendell and Sherlock Holmes in peep toe bedroom slippers and calling him Hal, picnics in the woods, patiently waiting in our towering apartment for him to arrive home, excited to see him, jumping up, wrapping my legs around his waist. A lifetime of missionary positions and dinners determined by what Henry ate for lunch, or what day of the week it is. Me, being content with this. Obedient. Compliant. He wavers. I see it in the way the syringe wobbles in his hand.
“Hal.” I say it again, but softer, coy, and I avert my gaze. Demure. How I would act if I were truly submissive, try to channel this twin intuition I’ve seen on Oprah. Even think, for a crazy second, if she can see me or hear me, Give me a goddamn sign, Joanie. What would you do? “What if I could do this, we could be happy, couldn’t we? We were once, right? Remember, the day in the woods? The picnic, I wore that purple shirt? We made love against the tree?”
I take a chance here, remembering the force at which he pushed me against that tree, the bark gouging into the soft skin on my back. I think back through our marriage. All the moments of the highest intensity, sweetest romance: Paris, the rooftop. Washington Square Park. Were they all repeat performances? His attempt to revive Tara, relive his past? I’d venture yes, by the way his eyes cloud and narrow and he’s studying me, torn between his logic and his base-level desires. His face softens, loses an edge.
He shakes his head, says nothing. I continue, “Paris? Our honeymoon?” And here, he breaks a bit, I can see it. His eyes widen and his jaw slacks. Henry is a rational man, but he wants this. Most people forgo logic when faced with something impossible that they viscerally want. “Let’s go to Paris. Again. You and me. We’ll relive it. Again. This time for real. Hal and TJ,” I choke out, lower my voice, dip my chin to my chest, and whisper, “You can help me, Hal. Show me. How to act, I mean. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to take care of me.” I realize with a sickening jolt that it’s actually true.
He doesn’t speak, he simply backs out of the room, his hand clutched tight around the syringe, his knuckles and his face an identical shade of white. He doesn’t agree. Yet. But he will.
At the very least, I’m here, still chained, but clearheaded. All I have to do is wait.
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“Hal. Hal.” I shake him, gently. It’s midnight, or later, I can’t tell. “I have to go.” He mumbles something against the pillow.
He hasn’t drugged me in a whole twenty-four hours. He avoids me, and this is either very good or very bad. He’s considering my offer. He hasn’t talked to me, but I chatter at him, rattling off every little thing I can think of that I saw in his boxes, on his corkboard. I talk about our wedding, my plate of scallops, the ornate centerpieces, how it was all just for us, which was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. I pretend to swoon and I’m girly. Excited, even. We could reenact it. Renew our vows, in Paris! He pretends to ignore me.
It’s brass tacks time, I blather about whatever comes to mind, about all the things I might have said, if I had been myself, but completely and totally under his thumb, meek and in love with him. It’s not even hard, like my brain has blocked out the mental images that should come naturally. Remember that day on the boat? I vaguely remember a boat, I don’t even know if Tara was on it. He has yet to speak. I’m becoming one person in his mind, I can feel it in the way he looks at me when I say certain things and he’s not sure: Tara or Zoe? Or rather, even if he knows that we can’t possibly be the same person, he sees the possibility exist for the first time. That I could pretend this, and stay. That maybe if I did that, became his preferred reality, we could be happy the way he and Tara were happy.