The Six Granddaughters of Cecil Slaughter (17 page)

She could not bring herself to tell Michael. She did not know what he would do—how he would react. He seemed exactly the wrong person to tell, that his response would only add to her own rattled confusion, her shame, her—at the time—amorphous rage.

So she told no one—at least for a long while—what had happened that night. How, afterward, she could not catch her breath. It was a Sunday—the beginning of the second week of January. That Monday he called to apologize. How he kept saying
sorry, sorry
over the phone as he had done the night before—after it happened—and repeating his excuse, “I just got carried away,” and his warning, “You cannot tell anyone. Do you understand this? You do understand this? Do you not?”

It seemed to her she must have had a seizure—her legs and arms started moving uncontrollably, she started gagging and she was having trouble breathing when he was almost finished with her. She remembers her naked body shivering on the bare, hardwood floor, almost quaking, and hearing the same
sorry, sorry
litany and the same excuse and warning.

He then sat down naked next to her and said, “Can I make you some tea?
Some tea? Some tea?”
As if begging. Finally, she agreed to some tea. Much more for him than for her—as if by drinking it,
that
meant forgiveness.

Monday she went to the doctor, because of her breath. She
still could not catch it and she had a poetry reading in two weeks. She needed her breath and her composure back. Dr. Astrich questioned her about the bruises that were beginning to swell on her inner thighs, her breasts, and the upper areas of her inner arms. He asked, “Did someone hit you, knock you down, pin you to the ground—beat you?” However, because he was becoming increasingly nervous, he made a joke of it and added, “Have you taken up boxing?” She quietly replied, “No, I fell.” She thought, “Like Eve. Naive
Eve,
naive
me,
both of us fallen to earth.”

She kept repeating to him, “I've lost my breath and you have to help me find it. I need to get it back.” It did sound odd, the way she put it, but he knew she was a poet and he liked how she expressed herself so he just smiled and did not question her further. Just told her if her breathing was still giving her trouble in a week to come back for an X-ray, which she did. It was walking pneumonia, for which he gave her a prescription for an antibiotic, saying, “This will cure it quickly.” She would, in fact, walk with it—a lodestone on her chest—for six months.

Then, “Nijinsky's Dog”—a poem he had never seen—a poem she knew would enrage him even more, was published a little over a year later. The poem existed as
a kind of telling
—a metaphor—an inaccurate, yet good enough record of how she felt afterward.

Her only witness to what had happened had died.
The dog.
His dog. When he left his wife, he took the dog and moved into an attic apartment with her. She remembers going up the winding outside flight of stairs of that house and seeing all the lovely furniture inside, the gleaming crystal fixtures through the large, sparkling panes of glass trimmed with swags of creamy silk. She thought how
much she would like to be going there. It was so unlike the narrowing space where she was heading—a place the owner had rented out and seemed to care nothing about—its two small windows bare and filthy. When he greeted her at the door with the dog, the first thing she noticed about her were her large, sad eyes. Then, her fur—so matted and knotted, so uncared for.

She jumped off his roof in late August of that year. He told everyone she had fallen. “Like
Eve?
Like
me?”
Over and over, she thought this. She listened to others talk about it with both outrage and relish. “He
left her
on that hot August roof to teach a class!” She wanted to scream at them, “She just couldn't stand it.
Couldn't stand any of it, anymore.
Just couldn't. So she jumped.” “A
grand jeté,
sailing in holy madness,” is how she wrote it. “A suicide,” is what she thought.

Right after she took off her coat he handed her something wrapped in bright colored tissue paper—robin's-egg blue—and with delight said, “A gift!” When she unwrapped it she found a bracelet. She was surprised—completely caught off guard—and flattered and she could feel the blood rush to her face. All she could think to say was a strong, but flustered, “Thank you.”

“Silver and obsidian,” he replied with great pride. “I bought it for you. It reminded me so much of your heightened, compelling intensity.”

She put the bracelet down on his desk, then carefully folded the crisp tissue and placed it inside her purse. She wanted so much to appear organized and calm. In fact, she was all excitement inside. Then, she picked the bracelet up and touched the rounded blade edges of the stones and thought of the burning lava from which they had been
born and the lustrous, thick, octagonal silver nuggets that linked the irregular chunks of deep blue obsidian—a rare color for this stone. She loved how the clasp was made of round silver magnets and how easily they met, snapped together, and held tight. She put it on her left wrist.

He was polite and spoke slowly of how pleased he was to see her and complimented her not on her face or body, but rather on the delicate necklace that hung over the turtleneck of her sweater—a plain silver chain from which a tiny, turquoise enameled starfish dangled—and how well it blended with her new bracelet. He had a good eye for detail.

On his worn couch he lead the conversation. First he asked about her mother. There was always a great concern in both his facial expressions and his voice when he spoke of her mother. When she lowered her head and said, “Not good, not good at all,” he shook his and replied, “Too bad, too bad.” It was clear she did not want to talk about her mother's illness anymore—she was just too close to death—and he immediately picked up on this, changing the subject to that of the intellect, for which she was relieved.

He talked about how important the role of the poet-critic was in the analysis of contemporary poetry,
not
just that of the academic, whom he felt sometimes drained all moisture from the topic. This, too, was unexpected—given that he was an academic and a critic, but not a poet.

He asked her what she thought of several poets and listened intently to her opinions. When she finished, he suggested she consider writing an essay about what she had just said. That he would be
pleased
to read it. And beyond all this, he continued, smiling, “Maybe we could collaborate on a series of such essays for a book.” She had
never thought of herself as a poet-critic, but she very much liked the idea of it, the possibilities of it—another positive invention of herself. At that moment she felt so focused on, and included unlike all her childhood exclusions, especially the insults directed at her from my parents—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—how they always gave her the role of the Wicked Son at the Passover Seder and their labeling of her to the others as the “dandelion.”

She loved the way he shared his mind with her and she loved her new bracelet. Toward the end of their conversation—right before dinner—he talked about a book he was writing on film noir—why these films continued to be popular. How he believed they still spoke to contemporary audiences about trust-relationships—“To see things in the dark as they truly are,” was how he put it. He then added, “Perhaps after dinner we'll watch the movie I am writing about right now—
The Postman Always Rings Twice
—so you can tell me what you think.” She felt so safe with all this talk until she mentioned, “These movies always seem to inevitably involve the betrayal of the most unsuspecting.”

He erupted into a laugh that seemed sinister, making her feel terribly uncomfortable, and then he glared at her—his eyes suddenly so absolutely empty. At that indelible moment she was not sure
she
was seeing things as they truly were. Instinctively, she looked the bracelet, and it occurred to her that it
was
an out-of-the-ordinary gesture for their relationship as it existed in the present and she became nervous. She thought of a starfish out of its element, flopping on the dry sand, fighting for its life, and she held tight to the charm on her necklace. He saw this and suggested they eat.

He had made a chicken dish. It did not smell quite right, because it was not fully cooked. She could see blood spots on the meat, and as she delicately tried to separate it from the bone—the cooked parts from the raw—with the dog quietly sitting next to her, it happened. The dog was as startled as she when he sprang from his chair and yanked her from hers. His hands were already on her breasts. Then she felt the dog's paws at her waist. She could feel the dog shudder. “Is the dog trying to protect me or is the dog wanting me to protect her?” she wondered in a thought-panic. At that moment the dog seemed half-human, half-animal and she, Cecilia,
seemed half-animal, half-human.
Her mind was whirling as she wondered, “Are we one and the same being?” She even thought of Nijinsky as the Faun and his becoming
half-animal, half-human
—her associations all a dervish dance.

He screamed at the dog and she ran under the table—hid there. Cecilia saw the dog under it as he pulled her to the futon. And yes, she
could
smell the urine from when his daughter had napped there earlier.

The more she cried for him to stop, the more he ripped at her clothes. Her hair went flying all over her face, her now bare skin, her breasts, while the dog stayed huddled, almost frozen in her own mountain of fur, except for the chewing,
that
unrelenting chewing,
her
unrelenting chewing on herself, her eyes crazed from the chaos. She and the dog stared at each other after it was over as Cecilia cowered on the soiled, hardwood floor. Now, the dog is dead—dead in the unrelenting heat of that August. The tarred roof burning her dog feet.

Driving herself home that night so badly bruised and mind-broken all she could think to do was to make up lines for a poem. A poem to distract her, to help her get home. Doing this did keep the headlights from the cars coming toward her and the taillights from the cars speeding past her from completely smearing into each other, as she kept wiping away the tears that would not stop arriving. Over and over the lines repeating in her head:

He bought me

a bracelet

of silver and obsidian

and after he broke the bread,

devoured it

he could not stop

saying

“Sorry, Sorry”

over and over again

“Sorry, Sorry”

circling like a vulture

over me over

a bracelet of silver and obsidian.

After the “dog poem” was published he called at least twice a week, his number popping up on her Caller ID, but he only spoke the first time, saying, “Now I
am
going ruin your career. I have the power.” After that he would just bash the phone down, as if to make sure she would hear the crash—to frighten her further, which it did. Still does, although the calls stopped a couple of months ago.

So she sits in her chair, worrying as to what he might do next and now also with her own, fully shaped, knife-sharp rage, thinking about all of it, thinking he was the last person inside her, which makes her sick—makes her feel polluted and that she will go to her death with this fact.

Everywhere she goes she imagines, “Someone is going to come along and throw me to the ground, drag me deeper into that dark forest where the archdemons await—Lucifer, Mammon, Asmodeus, Satan, Beelzebub, Leviathan. The German.”

She checks her body for marks every day, as if he had left something in her which she can never get rid of, something that will rise up. Some stain that eventually will make itself visible—that the cells in the deep layers of her body are mutating into some hideous blossom.
Which they are.
The heart's melanoma—a fury spreading with its pronged-in, black, ragged edges and its forever festering red center.