DID SOMETHING HAPPEN?, by Stephen Elliott
Joe punched Petey square in the face and Petey’s nose exploded and his blood splattered the garbage cans and a garage door. At least that’s how I heard it. Someone at the bar said he had it coming.
Petey went down after Joe punched him, landing in a puddle. He tried to get up but Joe kicked his feet out then stamped all over his legs. There was screaming as Joe continued to slam his boot-heel into the back of Petey’s legs until both of Petey’s knees were mush. Then Joe hit Petey over the head with a garbage can lid, then a bottle, which put Petey out for good until the ambulance came.
“Guess we won’t be seeing Petey around anymore,” Nico says, raising yet another beer to his cold red lips, showing off the burn on his forearm over where his tattoo used to be. Someone puts a song on. The pool players continue to shoot, unfazed by the news. Honey, who always sits on the end near the jukebox in a tight shirt with leopard prints across it, says, “Ain’t that a shame?”
I order another beer, one more than I usually have.
* * *
Petey had been stalking Joe’s girlfriend, Maria. He’s been stalking Maria for years. When Maria and I lived together in that yellow efficiency over Jonquil I’d look out the window at night and see Petey’s cigarette burning on the corner surrounded by the sounds of the jungle. I knew he was staring at the window and that he saw me looking at him. I knew he was waiting for Maria to walk to the front of the room where our little half-fridge stood. There were trees on that street with gym shoes swaying in the branches, and a park across from the building where the twins hung out. The kids sat there all night on the monkey bars. “He bothers me,” Maria would say from behind one of the books she was always reading, sitting on the couch which she had pushed away from the window as far as possible. It was a small room so nothing was that far from the window. I’d watch Petey out there and wonder why he wouldn’t just go away. And at some point Maria and I would crawl into the bed, below the lip of the windowsill. In the summer the window was always open. I’d slide around her wet body, my arm rolling around her shoulders and pull her into me, smell her brittle hair, feel the thick scar across her back rubbing into my ribs. We’d lie naked trying to get some sleep.
* * *
“I have an old friend,” I tell my wife, Zahava. She is sitting at the table in the dining room with papers spread out in front of her and a calculator. She’s studying them, pushing them this way and that, like a puzzle. I’m kind of leaning against the door frame with my head in the wall and she looks up at me and there’s color in her cheeks as if she had just been for a run. “He got beat up real bad tonight.”
“I’m sorry,” Zahava says. She takes her glasses off and pulls on the bridge of her nose.
“We had a falling out a while ago. We were roommates for years when I was a kid. When I was locked up. I’ve told you about that.”
“I’m sorry,” Zahava says again, placing a hand over the papers, holding the corner of the paper between her thumb and finger uncertainly and then letting go. “I’m sorry you had a hard time growing up.”
“Me? I didn’t have a hard time.” I unzip my jacket and throw it over the chair.
“Can you hang that up, please?” Zahava says.
“Petey got beat up so many times he didn’t even care anymore. You can’t even imagine. Compared to him, nobody had a hard time growing up.”
Zahava stands and passes me letting out a patient breath, picking my jacket up and walking it to the closet. She crosses the breakfront which is something her grandmother left her. There are dishes in there that we never use. “Was he nice?” she asks, buried in our closet.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I’m just trying to gauge if he brought it on himself or what the circumstances were,” she says emerging from the dark. “And then I intend on getting some work done. Don’t be so defensive.”
The bathroom is down a hall before the kitchen. We live in a nice two bedroom apartment on the third floor not too far from the lake and the train station. We keep the apartment clean. Was he nice? I run water over my face and sit down on the toilet. Think of my wife smiling and comfortable drifting along with the crowds downtown. There’s a little rack next to the toilet where Zahava puts her magazines when she’s through with them. I stare between my legs into the toilet water.
Zahava’s eyes are closed and the light is off. I sniff at my wife’s armpit. I slide my hand up her leg. Zahava makes a quiet noise and parts her legs and I press between them with my palm. I lay my palm on top of her vagina and gently slide a finger inside of her.
We keep our sex toy in an orange shoebox beneath the bed. I pull the box out, take the vibrator from the box. The moon is out in full tonight and the shades are up. I rub my face along her side and over her breast and kiss her cheek. Zahava places her hand on top of my head. The vibrator looks like a mermaid and a dolphin comes off the side meant to stimulate the clitoris. The top half of the vibrator is filled with silver balls that rotate around inside a silicone casing for easy washing. Zahava also likes oral sex and sometimes I do that. I consider doing it now. I run the vibrator along the outside of her vagina and I feel her fingers tense in my hair. She knows I like it when she pulls my hair.
Zahava takes her hand from my head and grips the sheets. She slides down and the vibrator sinks and disappears between her legs and then out. Her head presses into her pillow.
Zahava lets out a low moan. I press my hand onto her stomach and spread my fingers over her bellybutton. My wife. She came here from Texas to attend college. We’ve grown so apart. I enjoy this too. I enjoy making her happy. She deserves to be happy. At the law firm, where she works, she puts in long hours and people depend on her. I pull the blanket over my head; it’s dark and hot. Her legs are spread in shadow in front of me. I kiss my wife’s nipple and I watch the toy come in and out of her black pubic hair. We’ll both have to go to work in the morning.
* * *
I board the train at Morse and head toward the Loop. Sometimes I switch at Belmont to the purple line, which drops me closer to my office. Other times I don’t bother. I ride the old north-south through the city that I’ve always lived in, through Edgewater, Lakeview, Lincoln Park. I watch the buildings get nicer, the streets cleaner until Fullerton, where the train ducks underground. If I were to stay on the train, like I would if I was fifteen, and heading back to the residential treatment facility, then when the train rose back overground I would see a switch. As the train reaches above Roosevelt and into Cermak the last white people get off. At 35th I’d be at the hard corners of Stateway Gardens and the beginning of the Robert Taylor Homes, the largest housing projects in the world. After that the buildings are like broken teeth, burned down plots of land between them, liquor stores, abandoned hulks of steel and trashcan fires. At 55th I would have gotten off the train and attempted to walk to my home, through the Vice Lords and the El Rukns. And sometimes I would make it and sometimes I wouldn’t.
I head east from the Washington station to the Leo Burnett Building and stop in the cafeteria in the bottom of the building and buy a coffee and a bagel. Jim Thompson, the former governor of Illinois, has an office in this building and one time I saw him in the elevator and I said hello.
I put my bagel and coffee on the desk, turn on my computer, check for internal company memos. There’s been layoffs recently. I wait for my name to come up. I figure they don’t pay me enough to fire me. I’m a senior file clerk and sometimes I joke with Zahava that I am in charge of the alphabet. “Don’t misplace any letters,” she’ll say laughing. “We need all of them.” I stand and stare out at the sea of green file cabinets that I’ve worked with for so long. There’s thousands of them with thousands of records in each, documenting every employee that has ever worked here since the company was founded in 1933, during the Depression.
I finger through the papers. Feel a tap on my shoulder. “Happy Friday, Theo.”
Jim is my temp. He’s twenty-two years old. He just graduated from DePaul and we’re contracting him from Sally Girl. He may or may not stick around. “Jim,” I say. “I think today we should organize China.”
* * *
For years I’ve been seeing a professional dominatrix. Her dungeon studio is on the second floor of an industrial building, near the Lake Street train. Next door is an Irish Bar where first-time customers are expected to call in from the downstairs payphone. I remember the first day I went, it was during the Iraq war. She wrapped me in Saran Wrap so I couldn’t even move my fingers, she slapped me lightly then pulled a mask over my head with a long tube coming off of it so I couldn’t see at all and she whispered to me that there was nothing I could do. Then she pinched the tube and I couldn’t breathe. And I remember how it felt, like I was relaxing for the first time in my life. I usually go on Fridays but recently it hasn’t been working for me. Recently it hasn’t even been close.
I sit in an airy waiting room with my hands folded into my lap, my clothes in front of me in a wicker hamper. There’s a large desk with a rotary dial phone on it. A bowl full of mints. On the wall a single black and white photo of a dark skinned woman, a whip curled around her body like a snake. A blond lady comes in carrying a riding crop. She’s new. She’s tall, six feet at least with enormous breasts and wide hips. “Let’s go,” she says, snapping her finger in front of my nose.
I follow her through two rooms full of medical equipment, rubber masks with plastic eyes and long snouts, enema bags, baby cribs, cages, and into a third room which is populated with a padded wooden table, two large thrones with throw rugs in front of them, a leather hammock with metal chains at the end of it, walls full of whips, and strap-on dildos. “On the table,” the blond girl says. “Now.” I climb onto the table, face down. She yanks straps around my ankles. “Lower,” she says. “Wider.” She pulls on my legs, then my wrists. She pulls me around like a doll. Then her hand comes down heavily on my back. “Maybe I’ll have to come back and watch you,” she says. “Are you an exhibitionist?” I nod my head while sucking in on my lips. “I might like that.” And then she leaves.
The table is cold, especially against my privates. I wait for the familiar clap of Mistress Jane’s heels against the floor. She usually leaves me like this for ten minutes before coming in. The hospital is a long way from here. I’ll go there. Today was a bad day at work. Everything is bad recently. They used to get Petey in the bathroom with towels full of soap bars over his head and in his stomach and it sounded like music. He’d end up lying on the tile floor, his face full of blood, trying to smile, the blood running in rivulets through his teeth. I’d wash myself in the corner slot and stare at him lying there.
I hear the knocking and the long slide of a metal latch, the door opening as Mistress Jane walks in. Then see her, standing in front of me, latex shorts, her thick brown legs. I stare straight ahead, to the top of her thighs, her voice comes in above me. “What have we got here? Look at him. Oh, he looks so funny.” I hear the other girl, the blond one, laughing. Mistress Jane walks away from my field of vision. “What is this?” Mistress Jane’s hand reaches between my legs, grabbing, holding, and then squeezing, my body arching up involuntarily to give her a better grip, the familiar, painful squeeze shooting into my stomach and the involuntary sounds I make. “Hmm, hmm, hmm.”
The other girl’s hands are pressing firmly on the sides of my face. She’s wearing a strap-on dildo. She rubs it under my nose. Mistress Jane is wrapping a cord around my penis. I open my lips and the dark silicone head pushes toward the back of my throat. Mistress Jane pulls the cords tight and I let out a muffled scream. “Come on now, sissy. Sissy, sissy boy.”
* * *
Petey is alone in a pasta-colored hospital room just south of Bryn Mawr Avenue, the bed next to him empty. In the homes we were never alone, squeezed into rooms on mattress quotas. When we got out we all swam away. He’s watching the little TV up on the stand above him and shuts it off when I come in. He has dark yellow circles under his eyes, bandages across the middle of his face. Both legs in casts. When he smiles I see the missing teeth but he was missing teeth already.
“Theo,” he says, with that absurd, uncomprehending voice he has. We’ll do everything together. “You came to see me.”
I shake my head, put the flowers on the stand next to him and sit on the window ledge. The view below is flat roofs and smokestacks. A nurse walks by the room pulling a four wheeled dolly full of plates and urine samples.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Doctor says I’ll be out in a couple of weeks. Check this out. I press this button and it injects morphine. Want to try? I’ll dose you up. It’s craaaazy man.”
“They gave you morphine.” I smile and I consider it, but I don’t do it. We met in Western when I was twelve and Petey fifteen. I shouldn’t have been there. The walls were soundproofed and the doors locked from the outside. Petey had been stealing cars and driving them around Park Ridge and Elmhurst. He took cars from the city and drove them out to the suburbs where there are houses with green lawns and trees in front. He watched the mothers send their children off to private schools.
When they brought him back to my room I raised my hands and folded my arms over my head. “Don’t come near me,” I told him. Nothing could have been worse. He was the ugliest kid I had ever seen. I pulled my knees to my chest. I had my own problems.
“I haven’t shot dope in years,” I say plucking the needle from his arm, wiping the blood on my pants. I make a fist and squeeze my forearm with my other hand, push the pin into my wrist and Petey presses the button. It feels nice, like a hand over your face.
“That’s all you can get for ten minutes. Better take the needle out.” I pull the needle out and smile at Petey. The IV hangs between us. He presses the button and morphine squirts on the floor. “I guess you could have gotten more. Hee hee.”
I shake my head. “Big Petey.” The words come out of my mouth slowly. I shake my head more. Cobwebs. “You never win any fights.” I say, rubbing my chin and my cheeks. “That’s your defining trait, you’re a loser.” Hee hee. “I bet you spend more time getting beat up than you do sleeping. You always got beat up.”
“Not like you,” he says. “You had protection.”
“Protection costs something too,” I say, still shaking my head, leaning into the window, comforted by the glass and the rising smoke from below. We’ve never talked about protection before. Mr. Gracie, bringing me back into the room every Tuesday night. The long walk back through the corridors of the ward. The rooms locked from the outside and the boys sleeping. Mr. Gracie walking behind me but still hovering on my back, then unlocking my door and closing the door behind me. The rumble of the lock. Petey lying awake, waiting for me. His eyes like mirrors. I try to be the voice of reason. The high wears off quick as it came. I clear my throat. “My wife, you know.”
“You didn’t invite me to your wedding,” he says like it’s our own private joke.
“I didn’t invite anybody to my wedding. It wasn’t much. Just her family, some friends of hers from school, over-cooked chicken. You ought to stop following Maria. That guy she’s with, he’s an animal. It’s not safe.”
“Tell me about your wife.”
I put my hand up. “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” I say mimicking the Monty Python show. Petey smiles even though he looks terribly uncomfortable. It occurs to me that it’s my fault. “You’d like her,” I say. “Everybody does. She’s easy to like. She smiles a lot. She likes to have a good time. She used to do a lot of cocaine but she doesn’t anymore. That was a long time ago.” I shake my head. “Really Petey, leave Maria alone.”
Petey makes a movement that resembles a shrug of the shoulders. “I love her,” he says, as if it were the most simple thing in the world and the smell of the hospital had nothing to do with it, as if anybody that walks away from love is a fool and I know as soon as he gets out of here he’ll be standing outside her window again, hoping for a breeze carrying some of Maria’s scent. Maria smells like cheap lotion from a Jergens bottle, peaches, which is what her skin feels like where there aren’t scars. And Joe will kill him, because that’s the kind of guy Joe is.
* * *
I came home one day a long time ago to an empty efficiency and I knew Maria was gone for good. She’d been going out more and more, leaving the apartment in a short skirt with no underwear, the wind biting at her blue-veined legs. Heading down to the gas station, getting in cars. She’d come home with bruises, black eyes, a bloody nose.
“Don’t go out, Maria.”
“What do you know? Stop me.” What she was really saying was, Make it stop.
I made my own trips, to the Wasteland, but everything’s different. I was nineteen years old and knew less than I do now. I’d squeeze into Maria’s clothes when she was gone, walk the streets in her underwear, mascara around my eyes. The gangsters near Howard just laughed. “Hey bitch, you want to suck my dick.” I’d run from them. Sometimes I’d stop. Sometimes they’d catch me. I didn’t know what I wanted and Maria wouldn’t stay home. I cried when she showed up with hash marks cut across her chest. They were over her breasts and belly, thin diagonal slices. Red, with bits of blood on the edges. Her body looked like it had been hog-tied in razor wire.
“Who did this?”
“I wanted it.”
We’d look at each other sometimes and it would be so pathetic and sad, both of us beat up, neither of us able to protect the other one. Two years ago she called me at work. She was back in the neighborhood. She wanted me to meet her new boyfriend. She wanted to know what I thought.
We sat in the back room of a bar on a cobbled street by Loyola University, the kind of a place where old men order beer by the pitcher. Maria looked fit and healthy for the first time in her life. She kept her eyes low. The guy she was with had muscles coming out of his neck and shoulders like a car grill. She went to hug me and he grabbed her by the hair. She lightly patted my shoulder with one hand instead. I decided to ignore it. We had two beers and spoke in generalities about things like the cement border the Alderman erected in the middle of Howard Street. When I asked Maria where she had been she said, “Around.” Joe yanked her chair over to his and she folded her hands into her lap and looked at her hands. He spoke for her.
“She was in Wisconsin, working in the Osh-Kosh factory in Apple. OK. We live behind the Heartland.” He glared at me. He said he worked out six days a week and pushed his hands together to show me that he meant it. He said he knew how to kick-box. “Theo, or whatever your name is,” he said. “Maria had a hard childhood. Everybody has a hard childhood. I had a hard childhood. I used to get beat up a lot, believe it or not.” He talked like he had been sucking gas with pebbles in his mouth. “You know what I did to the people that used to beat me up when I was a kid? I found them later and I put them in the hospital. Every last one of them.”
I sipped my beer and stared up at the bar TVs. I wondered why Maria wanted me to meet him. Did she want me to save her? Or did he put her up to it? On the TV the Bulls were playing the Pistons. It was the playoffs. The Bulls would go on to win the world championship for the second time.
The next day Maria called me on the phone. I had to take the call at my boss’s desk. I didn’t have my own desk. “He hits me. You wouldn’t do that.”
“I hit you sometimes.”
“Not the way I like it.”
“I didn’t want to leave bruises.”
“I like bruises. I don’t want to make any more decisions.”
I pulled at the pens near the filing cabinets. Tore a sheet of papers from a legal notebook. I took a pen and pulled the cap off, then put the cap back on. Where I was sitting I could see a sliver of lake from the window not too far away. My boss kept a metal pencil sharpener on her desk shaped like the Eiffel Tower. “I don’t like it. He’s a monster. I bet he can’t even add.”
“You’re jealous,” she said, and I could hear that same anger in her voice. “You want the same thing so don’t judge me. You wish someone would tell you what to do. If you could find a girl to make your decisions you would let her. We’re the same.”
There was a pause. Maria was always smarter than me. There was one time when she boiled over. We had just moved in together. We were eighteen and she said I had broken her heart. She dragged me around the room by my hair, kicked me in the stomach, told me I was worthless, smacked me back and forth across the face, sat on me, pulled my face between her legs and wiped herself all over me. “I want you to smell like me. I want you to know how it feels.” But that was it. “I don’t want to do that again,” she said later. “It makes me feel bad.” Now we were on the phone. She was waiting for me to deny it. To tell her what she had with Joe was garbage. That she was just another abused housewife.
“I still don’t like it,” I told her. “It’s a stupid way to think.”
“It’s not thinking at all,” she said. “That’s the point.” That was the last time we spoke and Maria was the only girl I ever loved. I loved her more than anything.
* * *
“That’s two nights staying out late,” Zahava says. She’s putting dishes up in the cabinet. The papers that were all out on the table last night have been put away and replaced by a thin leather bag. As she reaches her shirt rises up and I see her thin pale stomach, the small muscles on her back squeezed together by the belt of her jeans. She’s getting better looking as she’s getting older. She wasn’t very pretty when we first met in a restaurant near the University four years ago. I was cashiering and she was waiting tables. I was working two jobs, night and day. Zahava was working and about to start law school. We sat at the bar at night, having drinks. Then we’d go out, the whole restaurant, all the waiters and the bartender and dishwashers. We’d go to clubs down on Belmont where we’d dance or sit at the bar with our chin in our fists. There were a lot of habits in that restaurant. One person died, others left town or went to rehab. Others got straight and got married. We don’t go out together anymore. We see each other at home. “You’re a wildman these days.” I take off my backpack and lay it by the door.
“I stopped to see Petey in the hospital. He looks terrible.” I pass to where we keep a Jack Daniels bottle on the second shelf. I have the urge to wrap my arms about her waist and kiss the back of her neck but I grab the bottle instead, pour a splash into a glass and top it with an ice cube. I move into the living room. Turn the TV on. There was no concern in her voice. I could have stayed out for a month and it wouldn’t have mattered. She’s been cheating on me for a while now. A guy she works with, Mickey. An athletic looking guy, tall, with thick black hair, strong features, high cheek bones. I get up, change the channel. Courtroom drama. This couch has gotten soft and old. How did this happen? She thinks I don’t know but she leaves her notebooks open, she goes to her “friend’s” house to play bridge. They do it at a pay-by-the-hour just west of downtown.
* * *
Nico is my last friend from the homes I grew up in. Though we’re not really friends. He once led a group of kids who pissed on my clothes when I was out of the room. One time, during a riot, Petey, Nico, and I stood back to back to create a “triangle.” It worked. When it was all over, and the place was locked down, we were relatively unscathed. Now Nico is heavyset. He works in the fish department at a high-end grocery store in Lincoln Park.
“Joe holds the door at Pine Lodge,” Nico says. “If you’re curious.”
“That’s right on the border,” I say. “No-man’s land.”
“Only four a.m. for miles,” Nico says. “And to the north of there it’s dry.”
I grab a napkin and scribble out a map. Eight lines, cross-hatches, a taxi stand, then nothing. There’s two pool tables now in the back of Carrie’s. Several groups of men hang back there, some with their own sticks, flames shooting up the wood. I shake my head, so bewildered by the things people do.
“Why don’t you go see Petey?” I say. “He hasn’t had any visitors.”
Nico waves his hand. “Payday mayday,” he says when the bartender comes over. “Did you visit me when I was in prison? How about a shot.” The bartender lays one shot of dark orange liquid in front of Nico and he raises his eyebrow and I nod and he puts a shot in front of me. Nico flicks his fingers and the shot disappears. He shakes his head. “Oogly oogly oogly, aaah,” he says. “Of course he hasn’t had any fucking visitors. He’s a loser.”
“There’s an obligation.”
“The statute of limitations has long since run out on any obligations I might have.”
* * *
On the very edge of Chicago’s mass, before a taxi stand, and then a gulch, and then the flickering lights of St. Francis followed by the wealthy suburb of Evanston, there’s a twenty-four hour Walgreens. Next to the Walgreens is a Jewel grocery store with a big, juicy orange sign. Next to that a shoe repair, a Ben Franklin General Store, and at the end of all that a Bakers Square, and then the Pine Lodge.
Late at night there are maybe twenty cars in the parking lot, all of them driving home drunk come four. I walk through the parking lot and feel the weight of the city pressing into my shoulders. Joe sits on a stool, his large frame dwarfing the leg irons, in jeans and a leather shirt, waiting as people come up to the bar, identification in hand. I wonder where all of these people come from, like ants crawling from a Howard Street sand hill, to go to this bar so late at night.
I hand Joe my ID and he looks at it and he recognizes me. “Didn’t think I’d see you again,” he says. His voice is higher than when we first met, and the muscles in his forehead seem to be forcing themselves over his eyes. His muscles are trying to swallow his face. “You sure do wait awhile. Maria said you’re a coward and you would never have the guts to come around.”
“Maria knows me best,” I say shoving my hands into my pockets. He drops my card onto the ground and looks the other way. I bend down to pick it up, smelling the leather of his black boots, my nose practically running over the laces. He shifts his foot slightly on the lower rail, the chair rung squeals, and I close my eyes.
I wade into the bar which holds only a little more light than the outside, most of it buzzing off the neon signs hanging on the windows and the walls and from the incessant ringing of the poker machines, of which there are three. I look above the bobbing heads trying to spot Maria.
“Are you or aren’t you?” the bartender asks. She’s beefy and blond and I take her right away for the owner of the place.
“I am,” I tell her. “I’ll have a Budweiser.” I push her my five dollars and she places a bottle in front of me. So now I have a weapon. I leave seventy-five cents on the bar and walk back near the bathrooms and the pool table, where Maria is sitting mostly alone, not far from the dartboard. And it seems to me for a minute like she wants to get hit by the dart and that’s why she’s sitting there, in the most available place. But she isn’t available, and people obviously know that. And she sits in front of a glass of clear liquid. And there’s a tiny lamp on the bar. And she’s reading by it.
“Anything interesting?” I ask. She turns the book down and looks up at me, her face a mixture of embarrassment and surprise. It’s one in the morning. Years have passed.
“You’re making a mistake coming here.”
Of course I am. I pull my hand from the bar and wipe the residue on my pants. “Time waits for no man,” I say trying to make a joke. I drink my beer down quickly. For courage. I take in her dark cheeks. Maria has round features, round sad eyes, a round face. She used to tell me she looked like a house cleaner, which simply isn’t true. I think she looks like a school teacher.
“I’m just shocked,” she says. “Wow.” My throat feels tight and I wonder how I’m going to breathe. “Wow,” shaking her head. After a bit Maria says, “I’m working at the library again.”
“I’m still working at the same place. But I took a break to work in a restaurant once.” I feel my body bending toward her.
“That advertising company or whatever?”
“Yeah.”
We don’t say anything for a little while, and then a few guys behind us knock a pitcher of beer off a table and Joe comes storming back. “What the fuck’s going on?” But he’s talking to the guys that spilled the beer. One of the signs makes a quick, piercing sound and shuts off.
“What’s it like?” I ask.
“What’s it like? It’s wonderful,” she responds. “I still see Nadia. I’m not allowed to have guy friends. You know, he gets jealous easy, which I like. I have to tell him everything I do and everywhere I go.” I nod. Wait for her to continue. “He tucks me in at night, makes sure I brush my teeth in the morning. He does these things for me. It’s hard to explain. We have an entire setup in the basement. And he’s nice to me, though I suppose he’ll beat me around quite a bit tonight. But he really is nice. It’s better than the alternative. I was going to kill myself.” She puts her hand on the bar and turns it over so I can see her wrist. We both stare at her wrist together. It’s like a one way map.
“It’s kind of a funny compulsion, huh?” And I feel that warmth of nostalgia. The red neon is backlighting her hair, the tiny yellow light surrounding her cheeks.
I lift my hand, intent on pushing her hair back. “Don’t,” she says.
“You don’t have to be with that guy,” I say. “There’s other things.”
Maria laughs a little bit, and raises her hand as if she was going to touch my cheek. “You’re a hero now?”
“I went to visit Petey. He’s not going to walk again.”
Maria looks down into her drink. I signal for another one and I’m sure the bartender sees but she ignores me. “There was a restraining order out,” Maria says quietly. “He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near me. The police ruled it self-defense.”
“That was hardly self-defense.”
“We haven’t seen each other in years and this is what you want to talk about.”
“Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Oh no,” I say.
Maria looks at me like I’m a stray dog with rabies. “Don’t do this.”
“Don’t you remember? We all promised.”
“We were a group of kids when we said that. And we didn’t mean it. That was before Petey was following me to the grocery store. And you gave away all of our money. And before Tom overdosed and died and Larry went to jail. All of those promises are shit. The group homes,” she says. And she says group homes quietly and with such contempt that it runs right through my bones. “Who could blame anybody for wanting to forget.”
When I feel Joe’s fingers pinching my neck I swing my bottle at him, which is about the bravest thing I’ve ever done, but I miss. He catches the bottle in his hand and casually dumps it into the trash. He pulls me through the bar and the patrons make way for us and the bartender wipes out her glasses and doesn’t even pretend to look up. Joe pushes me into the parking lot, under the phosphorescence. I stumble, nearly fall, catch myself with my hands on the asphalt. I turn raising my arm and expect to get hit but he’s standing ten feet behind me at his post at the door.
“Get out of here,” he says.
The parking lot is empty. Everybody is either in the bar or home asleep. In the whole world it’s just me and Joe. “You can’t do what you did,” I say.
“Leave us alone, jackass. We’re happy. Don’t try to interrupt us.” He’s not afraid of me at all. I brush my pants and feel my hand’s cut. There’s gravel in my hands. Joe is buttoning his shirt. He doesn’t think I’m going to do anything, and he’s right. The night out here, on the edge of nowhere, nothing but the sounds of a taxi or two making the rounds.
* * *
A cuckold is a man who watches his wife with another man, but it used to mean something else. To be cuckolded, is that the ultimate humiliation? Or is it the humiliation of wanting to be humiliated? I don’t know what I was looking for when I found that word. I don’t know what I was looking for when I let Maria go. I knew exactly what her needs were. It would have been work, and I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but I could have given her everything she needed. Maria was going to get what she wanted no matter what. I could have hit her enough to keep her safe.
My wife sleeps quietly in the bed. The room is full of her breathing. Then she moves and the blanket rises exposing her pale ankles. She’s questioned her decisions before. Sometimes she says that maybe being a lawyer wasn’t the best idea for her. She wasn’t offered a job with a firm after her law school internship. She had to start at the Labor Relations Board. I pull the belt from my pants and place it on the dresser. Take my shirt off, my pants. Stand naked, watching my wife. I pick my belt off the dresser. I watch her movements. Watch her wake up. Her small eyes opening slowly. The way she looks at me. Naked, with a belt in my hand, in front of her.
“I want you to tie this belt around my neck,” I say, the belt hanging limply over my hand. “And drag me around with it like a leash. I want you to spit on me. I want you to slap me and call me names.” The words fall like dust on top of the furniture.
A wave of panic crosses Zahava’s face and then leaves. “What are you talking about? Turn on the light.”
“Please,” I say.
Zahava considers my words. “I have to be in court tomorrow. Come here.” She slides down to the end of the bed. I hand her the belt and stand in front of her, turning around. I hold my breath and then the belt whips across my back. I feel the sting and my mind goes blank for a second, the warmth of pain covers me. “It’s OK,” she says, rubbing her hand over where she’s just hit me, tracing the welt with her finger. Then the belt lands again, then again. My back burns. She hits me five times and then she stops. She pinches a bit of my lower back and twists.
“Ow. Ow.”
“Now let’s go to sleep.” She’s touching me, her hands at my waist.
“Haven’t I been good to you?” I sit down on the floor and Zahava sighs. She slips from her blanket and her feet are on either side of me and I place my head in her lap, my arms around her waist.
“What’s happening to you, Theo? You know?” She’s awake now. As calm as a lawyer. She speaks to me like someone she cares about but no longer knows. She’s running her long fingers through my hair. “You’re not acting like yourself. I know you like these things. It’s not terrible. People need different things.” She pauses. Zahava has a sour smell. “People need their attorneys to be on time and to be rested as well. Don’t be selfish. Please.” I press my face into her pubic hair.
“Why do you cheat on me?” I ask.
“Hey,” she says. “Hey.” Now she is really pulling my hair, trying to get me out of her. “Don’t start that shit. We’ve been through this before.” She’s looking me square in the eyes. “Just stop it.” I keep my mouth shut.
“Please,” I say quietly, rolling my bottom lip over. She lets go of me and I drift back between her legs.
She keeps saying things like, “What happened tonight? Did something happen?” But it’s like she’s talking through water and I can’t hear a word she’s saying. And I’m thinking about where the highways will take me. The smell of Zahava’s legs, her thighs against my cheeks. How she smells inside. She’s so thin I can feel the bones in her legs. I feel the pressure of her fingers against my scalp. “Enough, Theo.” She’s trying to pull me up by my hair and I’m resisting, pushing my face further against her vagina. If I could wrap myself in her, if I could suffocate. If she would place her hand against my throat and choke me. I’m thinking about every other place in the world and knowing that tomorrow I’ll be gone.
Stephen Elliott has recent work in GQ, McSweeney’s, The Sun, Adbusters, and Fourteen Hills. He is the author of several novels including What It Means to Love You and A Life Without Consequences, both published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing.