The Secret Lives of Married Women (12 page)

Just this morning, sitting on his knee at the breakfast table, she had spat a mouthful of chewed-up Cheerios directly into his own cereal bowl. He watched this happen without any expression and continued eating as before.

I resolved to make love to him in the morning. To wake him up that way.

* * *

At close to one
A.M
., I gave up on sleep and went down to the kitchen. I had decided to record the final poem in the book. The title was
A Postmortem Guide
and the dedication read:

For my eulogist, in advance.
The narrator of the poem was leaving instructions for his own funeral speech.

Do not praise me for my exceptional serenity,
it began.

Can’t you see I’ve turned away

from the large excitements,

and have accepted all the troubles?

Go down to the old cemetery; you’ll see

there’s nothing definitive to be said.

Would Jack have a eulogy? Someone to say that despite a tough beginning in life, he’d been a hard worker, talented at construction, faithful in his fashion, kind to his dog?

And, please, resist the temptation

of speaking about virtue.

The seldom-tempted are too fond

of that word, the small-

spirited, the unburdened.

After our conversation that afternoon, Rae had sent me two text messages. She never wrote his name, but I knew they were about Angel. “I’m so weak! He showed up without warning and I let him in. Damn, damn, damn! I can’t tell you how I hate myself!”

The second one, sent moments later: “P.S. It was fantastic.”

Adam’s my man and Eve’s not to blame.

He bit in; it made no sense to stop.

Still, for accuracy’s sake you might say

I often stopped,

that I rarely went as far as I dreamed.

With the construction boss in custody of the state, who would finish the house next door? And given its grisly history, who would ever move into it?

In a circle of lamplight in the darkened kitchen, I read the poem’s ending into the recorder:

You who are one of them, say that I loved

my companions most of all.

In all sincerity, say that they provided

a better way to be alone.

Whenever the door to the office opened, Nan would listen for the bang of Abel’s cane, striking one side of the entrance and then the other: a sound more soothing to her than rain on the roof. Sometimes he spoke to her as he passed the reception desk; sometimes he went by without a word.

She knew she should speak first. Otherwise he couldn’t be sure she was there. More than once, she had come back from an errand or break to see him standing there, talking to the air.

But in his presence she was often overcome, and as often as not she said nothing when he came in, just stayed still and quiet and diffident and diligent and exultant.

* * *

Nan had met Abel when she interviewed for a job as his reader. There was no end to the printed material he needed to hear: leases, legal briefs, faxes, contracts, a few different newspapers and his daily mail. She was trying to figure out what, if anything, she could do in the real world, when she saw his want ad in the
Brooklyn Eagle.

The interview took place at his home in Prospect Heights. It was a December morning and there was snow on the ground. For long minutes before their appointed meeting time, Nan stood on the sidewalk in front of his brownstone and felt afraid.

What was this fear about? She had never known anyone who was blind. Being alone with a blind man in his own house— he’d mentioned that his family was away for the weekend—was a strange and unsettling idea. But it was more than that. It had also occurred to her that much of what she usually relied on in a job interview would not help her in this one. Her dark blonde hair, pulled back into an elegant twist and pinned in place with lacquered chopsticks. The cut of her charcoal skirt and freshly ironed blouse; the dark stockings that hid the marks on the back of her legs; the mirror finish on her patent leather pumps.

It was disconcerting to realize how much she relied on her youth and beauty. But it went beyond that. There was also her array of appealing expressions—wide-eyed, impressed, sympathetic, sincere—that rarely failed to ingratiate her with others. In a job interview, she always looked straight into the employer’s eyes and never let her gaze waver. On the other side of this man’s threshold, with so much stripped away, Nan suddenly had no idea who she would even be.

Finally she went up his front walk, made herself ring the doorbell, and stood looking through one of the windows that flanked the door. His dog—a German shepherd with the weathered beauty of a wolf—appeared first, barking and showing teeth. Then the man himself materialized at the far end of the room, and through the warped and slightly darkened pane of what might as well have been one-way glass, she watched him grope his way toward her.

* * *

One of Abel’s eyes was a prosthetic; the other was wandering and bleary. Both were pressed deep beneath the ridge of his jutting forehead. The sides of his head were dented in, as if mauled by forceps while the skull was still soft. His hair was a light brown gone halfway to gray, somewhat sparse in front and visibly brittle.

“Nan?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m Abel.”

His voice was a surprise. She had never spoken with him, only with his secretary, who managed his schedule and had set up this interview. With his first words to her, a certain understated yet unequivocal authority asserted itself so matter-of-factly that it was like being buoyed by a wave—a bodily and unreasoning happiness breaking over her before she knew why. He spoke with a self-assurance that bordered on indifference. His tone sought nothing—not attention nor approval nor agreement nor goodwill.

Nan clasped the hand he held out to her and looked around the front room, which was furnished in warm colors: wine and bronze and mahogany. There were oriental rugs and hanging tapestries and polished wooden furniture. When the dog darted behind her, she glanced over her shoulder and what she saw in the tarnished mirror above the fireplace stopped her breath. Up and down the back of her blouse were faint parallel lines of blood. The welts: she hadn’t considered them at all, hadn’t covered them with gauze or thought to wear a camisole...

It was a long and harrowing moment before she remembered that this particular interview would not be compromised by the oversight.

Abel said, “I was hoping to be able to speak with you right away, but something’s come up and I need to make a phone call first. Why don’t you go wait in my office—I shouldn’t be too long.”

He directed her to a set of stairs leading to the basement, and she went down to find a nearly empty room. After the lavish first floor, it looked especially spare, holding nothing but a battered desk, a couple of chairs, and a tired sofa against one wall.

Nan took a seat and waited. This seemed to be his domain within the house. The only thing to look at was a single framed photograph on his desk of a smiling woman with a little girl. There was nothing on the walls, no books or magazines, nothing to do but wait for him. But having heard his voice, the tension of waiting for him was not without some pleasure.

When after a full twenty minutes he appeared in the room, she asked, “Is this a picture of your wife and child?”

“That photo was taken more than a year ago,” he said. “And Deirdre tells me that Lu looks very different already. But yes, it’s the most recent one of the two of them that we’ve gotten around to framing.”

“She—Lu?—she looks so different from the two of you.” She looked in fact like she might have come from a former marriage. She had straight black hair, laughing black eyes, and a complexion the color of strong black tea. Whereas Deirdre, like Abel, was pale and light-eyed.

“Lulu was adopted,” he told her.

He couldn’t have known the effect these words would have on Nan. How could he have known? She wanted to tell him, “I was adopted too,” but that would have been a half-truth at best.

As it was, she said nothing at all. Abel took the seat at his desk and asked, “Do you have a résumé?”

“Not with me,” Nan said, alarmed. Because of course, she had no real résumé at all. “I didn’t think I’d need one,” she added.

“You don’t, really,” he said. “Not to be a reader. All that matters for this position is how you read. But I have a lot going on. Who knows what other uses I might find for you?”

And with this provocative choice of words, Nan liked to think that he started the game—the secret, sweet, and impossibly subtle game that sustained her for so long. And like all of their best moments, it was seamless. She heard his words, absorbed their little thrill, then spoke as if no underlying message had been sent or received.

She said: “I can bring one next time. Or I could get it to you within the next day or two.”

“Well, let’s see what happens,” he decided. “Meanwhile, are you employed at this time?”

“I am. But I want to leave my job as soon as possible.”

“Okay. And what are you doing now?”

There was a silence while Nan found herself in an unforeseen quandary.

“Hello?” he said after a long moment.

And then, instead of saying what she’d planned—that she was temping four or five times a week—Nan heard herself begin, falteringly, to tell him the truth. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not sure how to explain this. But the fact is that what I do is very strange.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me what it is?”

It didn’t seem possible to lie. She didn’t feel like she had anything on him because she could see and he couldn’t. She imagined that blindness had endowed him with a vast set of special powers: ears like a lynx, sonar like the bat, exquisite sensitivity, intuition bordering on clairvoyance. This turned out to be a romantic notion. People lied to him all the time. They had him sign doctored company checks, inflated the total on invoices and pocketed the difference, gave him one-dollar bills as change and told him they were other denominations. But for reasons having little to do with integrity, Nan never lied to him, then or ever.

“I work for a place called the Nutcracker Suite,” she began.

“All right,” he said, and waited.

“Have you heard of it?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Well, then...do you know what a dominatrix is?”

“Yes,” he said. “Is that what you are?”

“Well, in fact,” she told him, “I’m the opposite. I’m a professional submissive.”

She felt this information fill the space between them.

“Really?” he said at last.

“Yes.”

She spoke quietly, without a hint of defiance or apology. She had to hope that her even tone would save her, because she knew that what she’d just confessed was worse than being a dominatrix. It was worse than being a stripper or even a whore. And the reasons for this went beyond the strange nature of the job—beyond, even, the idea that she might be mentally ill. More to the point was the fact that masochism was deeply unattractive. Nan understood this, because it repelled her too.

Abel did not respond with the questions other people always had. He didn’t ask Nan what it was like, and so he didn’t learn that men paid the house for an hour of her time in return for a menu of the ways they were allowed to punish her: a list of the implements at their disposal and others that could be wielded at extra cost. He didn’t ask, either, why a poised, self-possessed and well-spoken young woman would let men hurt her for a living.

In fact, he asked no further questions at all about her current job, and she thought that under less desperate circumstances her confession would have ended the interview. But he was in dire need of a reader that day. His wife was out of town, he had no other interviews lined up for that afternoon, and the pile of papers on his desk was seven or eight inches high.

She imagined that he thought:
well, she’s here, and I need someone now; I’ll use her today, pay her and get rid of her, and next week I can find someone else.

But then she began to read.

And she read as if this were an audition upon which her highest hopes were pinned. She read as if an oracle might be divined from the document if only it were rendered with enough care. She read with the reverence she’d once brought to her sessions at the Nutcracker, bending to the text like an animal to a river.

Within minutes it became clear that she could not possibly read too fast for Abel. (She learned later that he could absorb the contents of a cassette tape as it was being dubbed at high speed.) And she discovered also, only minutes into the venture, that reading like this—clearly, out loud, at an urgent pace for a long period of time—was not easy at all.

It was a task that demanded undivided attention—the discipline not to look up, for instance, when his dog ran into the room. It took a fierce and unrelenting focus to anticipate the inflection of a sentence before reaching the end of it; to scan ahead to upcoming words while forming the ones before; to articulate them precisely while rattling at the clip of an auctioneer. It took stamina to plow through page after page, and stoicism not to betray a flicker of fatigue. It took everything: back, shoulders, neck, eyes, lips, tongue, teeth, heart.

When Nan had read fifteen pages, he asked whether she was getting tired. She told him she wasn’t. When she’d done thirty, he asked how much longer she could go on. I can go on as long as you want, she said. When she finished the first contract—a fifty-seven page document—he said, “You know, you’re excellent. Really. Hands down, you’re the best reader I’ve ever had.”

“I’m so glad,” Nan said.

“I’d love to keep going,” he said. “But tell me—and please be honest—can you stand to read any more?”

“I would be happy to,” she said, and it wasn’t a lie. She couldn’t say she wasn’t suffering. But it was the kind of suffering she lived for—putting out, for all she was worth, for a man who would cherish the effort.