He lets out a long, defeated sigh, as if he knew all along, his instinct has served him well, if only he’d trusted it and not me. ‘You’ve been seeing him all this time.’
‘I stopped for a while . . .’ his eyes meet mine, he knows when I stopped, it was when I started with him, when I was with him all day, every day, ‘and then, I started again when I stopped going to the field.’ The field, Rachael, what she said,flashes throughme – he has made me intense and needy and weird. ‘What are you angry about? That I kept a secret? Or that the secret is a boy?’
His mouth falls open.
‘I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d act like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘Jealous!’ I spit the word out, like he spat my name, tit for tat, though I’ve never thought about it like this. It feels unreal, distant, I’m not sure I believe what I’m saying or if I’m just parroting something I’ve watched, because none of it fits with any of those stories – he is my stepfather and my lover. Still, I can’t stop. ‘You want me all to yourself, cooped up in this cottage or on the field. It’s too much. I’m allowed to do things that aren’t with you. I’m allowed to have friends that aren’t you.’
He rubs his jaw. ‘You think I’m angry because I don’t want you to have friends?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m trying to protect you.’
‘You don’t know him!’ I explode. ‘You don’t know anything about him! We talk about plants! We swim!’
‘We swim!’ he repeats, a cruel parody of my voice. ‘You parade round in a swimsuit every day and you think all you do is swim?’
My eyes sting with tears. ‘We’re friends!’
‘He isn’t friends with you.’ His voice is softer, scarier than I’ve ever heard it. He crosses the kitchen. I edge round the island. Days ago, we did exactly this, played chase, he caught me on the sofa, pushed back my hair, laid a trail of kisses from shoulder to ear. But that isn’t what’s happening now. His face is pale, his jaw is rigid. I catch my side on the corner of a cabinet and then he is right in front of me. ‘All he wants isthis.’ He yanks down the strap of my summer dress.
I am not wearing a bra. In that split second, with my dress hanging off one shoulder, we remember the same thing, that time he said,You don’t have to wear underwear with me, so I didn’t, he liked putting his hand on my knee as we drove back from Falmouth, sliding it lazily up and down my thigh. But while the memory makes me weep, the shameful way it shatters against me clutching at my strap, it has a different effect on him. His body tenses. He lurches past me and punches the kitchen door. The wood explodes.
I scream.
He clutches his fist with his left hand. He backs into the kitchen cabinet, slides down. ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ he is whispering. He covers his eyes with his elbow. ‘What’s wrong with me?’
His bewilderment unravels me, I can’t remember why we’re fighting. I drop down onto the floor beside him, put my hand over his bleeding knuckles. ‘Nothing’s wrong with you. Nothing.’
He shakes his head. I pull open his arms, get into his lap, wait for his body to register mine, his sigh when he feels me around him,I love you against me, he always says.It works. His arms clutch my back. ‘I’m going insane,’ he whispers.
‘You’re not.’
‘My head is killing me. I’m losing my mind. I’m out of control.’
‘It’s okay.’
‘It’s not.’ He inhales my hair deeply, desperately, like I am breath, I am air. ‘You can see him. You can see whoever you want.’
I take his hand, bring his knuckles to my lips. His blood in my mouth is bright and metallic and I wonder why I’ve kept Alex a secret, it feels stupid now, a childish game when this man, rawand bleeding in front of me, is all I could ever need. I shake my head. ‘I don’t need anyone but you.’
He presses his lips to my forehead. It is a gesture he does many times a day, when he wakes, when he leaves, before he goes to sleep. But this time, it isn’t brief or tender. It’s hard. As if he wants to deliver the full force of himself into my skull, right through my body, all the way down.
When I was eleven, Mama dated a conductor, a man with stringy brown hair that he ran his fingers through to give it volume. It seemed to go well, until he showed up at two a.m., pounding against the door with the flat of his palm, ‘Let me in, youlet me in.’ We found each other in the dark of the living room as we watched the door shake and then she pulled me into her arms and whispered solemnly, ‘Promise you’ll never be with a man like this. Promise.’
Is Daniel ‘a man like this’? I push aside whether I can apply Mama’s advice to her own husband, wonder constantly about what she would think. Was she afraid a man who hits a door would hit her? I don’t think Daniel would ever hit me. The strap, wrenched down my shoulder, was rough but not intended to hurt.
Perhaps it was the reaction of violence that mattered to her, that it was an option.
I watch for this. A tractor driver pulls out in front of him without signalling – he doesn’t shout or swear. His article on the Blues is rejected by an entomology journal – he slumps into the pink sofa, presses his fingers to his temples. Soon, nothing reminds me of how he punched the door, except the ugly hole in the door itself, its splintered edges. Even that disappears. One Saturday,we come back from Falmouth and the door has been replaced. It’s as if the punch never happened. A bad dream long past.
But the fight has changed us. Daniel starts getting migraines; his mood swings. In one afternoon, he’ll send me an extravagant delivery of hothouse flowers that I will draw and paint while he brings me iced lemonade. But hours later, he will read something in my face, an expression, a thought: ‘You’re too innocent. You don’t know what men are like. What they want,’ and in these moments, it feels like the same fight we had in the kitchen has not ended, that it is an elevator in a building that never stops.
The more he talks about Alex (‘fisherboy’, he calls him) the more I want to see him. If only for the few hours of relief when I do not feel documented, studied, when I can laugh about his catch or the tides or tell him about the boy growing vines of monkey-ladders from a drift seed he found off the north coast. Daniel’s words circle in my head,All he wants is this, but the longer I am apart from Alex, the more convinced I am that Daniel was wrong. The fact of our friendship, that there was no more to it, is the substance of my relief.