White Ivy(83)

He reached for her hand but stopped when she flinched. “I’ll get you some ice,” he said flatly, disappearing to the kitchen.

She heard him rummaging around the refrigerator, opening and closing cabinets. What just happened, she wondered. Was there a manual for how to react when your lover slaps you? What would Sylvia do?

She lay there for a minute before morbid curiosity made her walk out to inspect herself in the entryway mirror. The left side of her face was blotchy pink with mascara and lipstick smeared all over. She tried to comb her hair with her fingers but found that her fingers were too stiff. She looked like a ravished woman. Or a ravaged woman. It was basically the same thing.

Roux came back with an ice pack. He had wiped off his blood but the scratches and dime-sized chunk of scalp, where the hair was missing, looked white and lumpy, like tofu, and spotted with smeared blood. Their eyes met in the mirror; both paused for a second, taking in this wanton portrait. The unsentimental gray eyes, in tune with her every movement, seemed to say she’d deserved it, that he wasn’t sorry, that he could do it again, and maybe worse.

Sylvia would be cold and indifferent, Ivy decided, recalling the mechanical way Gideon’s sister’s expression had straightened after Roux had dumped her in front of her entire family. Maybe Roux, not Sylvia, as she’d assumed, had been the source of their volatility. Roux, who had had no father growing up and could only resort to sordid violence.

Ivy walked into the living room. Roux followed.

“Want to watch a movie?” he asked, seeing her look toward the television screen. She’d only been trying to see her own reflection.

“All right.”

Roux dimmed the lights. It was a French movie they’d already seen, about a high school girl who falls into prostitution out of boredom and ends up accidentally killing her seventy-year-old client during sex. Halfway through the film, Roux reached his hand underneath her shirt and cupped her breast. They had sex on the sofa, swift, urgent, without preamble. The flames from the gas fireplace flickered over his naked body, illuminating the marble-white skin, the powerful chest, the body that was so much larger than her own. Bone for bone, flesh for flesh, he could crush her if he wanted. He could beat her senseless, suffocate her with his pillow, bash her skull against the wall, he had the power to do all this and she wouldn’t have the strength to stop him. He grabbed her leg and hitched it over his waist. They tumbled onto the floor. I love you, he whispered, piercing her neck with his teeth. She dug her nails into his fleshy thighs, slick with sweat, until he groaned with pain and pleasure. When they finished, he rolled away and they lay side by side on the ground, several feet apart, panting up at the ceiling. The movie’s theme song began playing in the background. Ivy caught the last scene—the lithe French virginal heroine who was a prostitute lying in bed with her dead lover beside her, smoking a cigarette, as the police cars pulled up in front of her house—before the screen faded to black. She and Roux often watched foreign films like these. The unfamiliar language, the characters’ detachment, the portrayal of sex as a clinical act—all of it depressed her, yet she also found the films comforting in some ways. They portrayed, more or less, her own reality.



* * *




AFTER ONE OF her mother’s beatings, Ivy could, at least, count on being left alone for a few days. If the beating was particularly vicious, Nan might even cook Ivy’s favorite dishes and allow her to watch television before starting her homework. Nan neither justified nor apologized. Roux’s guilt, on the other hand, made him truculent. He wanted Ivy to know exactly why he’d behaved thus, why he’d hit her, why he was driven crazy by her—it was all because he loved her. He’d told her so in the heat of their lovemaking, which, like anything said during sex, didn’t count. But admitting it seemed to have unlocked some previously untapped source of male possessiveness. He had never before wooed her, never tried to be her boyfriend, but now his romantic gestures were unrelenting.

The morning after their fight, Ivy received a same-day FedEx package with no return address. Inside was a black velvet box holding a pair of earrings. They were shaped like origami cranes, each the size of a thimble. The lines of the crane’s beak, the right angles of its wings, the jutting plane of its tail, were all molded in forward movement, as if the bird was about to take flight. She knew immediately who’d sent them. What frightened her was how Roux had gotten her address. She glanced across the street to where the men with the SUVs stood smoking in their usual spot. She’d seen them come in and out of the house and thought they must be running some kind of business from there. Now she wondered if Shen had been right when he’d called them gangsters. And if they were gangsters, might they be associated with Roux? She hurried inside and drew the curtains.

Roux called every day the following week, asking to see her. She picked up at first, making excuses about having her period, prior engagements, car troubles. He accused her of lying—You’re fucking pathological, you know that? She accused him of being a savage woman-hater. She finally demanded that he stop calling; when he refused, she threatened to block his number. “Do that and see what happens,” was his chilling reply.

She sold the crane earrings he gave her to a pawnshop. With the money, she went to an upscale boutique in Back Bay and bought a cocktail dress of pink organza, patent leather Ralph Li-Ping stilettos, and a crocodile-skin clutch. It would be her outfit to the Cross wedding, an event she had dreaded for months but which she now looked forward to as a means of escape from Roux. Now that he knew her address, she lived in perpetual terror of his showing up on her doorstep when Andrea was home, or, more disastrously, when Gideon was over. The city itself seemed to press against her, hostile in its harsh noises, the drills of construction sites, police sirens. Every night, she crossed off another day on her calendar. May 22, her wedding day, was circled with a red heart. Only seventy-two days away, she told herself. She said it like a prayer: Seventy-two days. Seventy-two days. Seventy-two days.