“He must be out of his mind.”
She looked up, startled.
“A girl like you,” Megan explained. “Any man married to a woman like you would have to be crazy to look at another girl. Maybe you don’t know it, Rhoda, but you’re a beautiful woman.”
Unconsciously, she felt herself blushing. She covered her nervousness first with another longer sip of Chianti, then by lighting a cigarette. She drew on the cigarette, took smoke deeply into her lungs, then blew it out in a long thin column that hung hazily together as it floated toward the ceiling. Her eyes followed the column of smoke while it rose. Then they dropped to fix on the base of the wine bottle.
“I don’t know whose fault it was,” she said. “I…it was a big mistake from the beginning, the whole thing. I met him and he gave me a big rush and proposed, and I managed to fool myself into thinking I was in love with him.”
“That happens.”
“I guess I made it easy. I was all alone here in New York. I didn’t know anybody. And family, not here or anywhere else. He was nice to me, and he was successful and good-looking and he wanted to marry me, and I managed to talk myself into being in love with him.”
She finished her wine, barely noticed when Megan refilled her glass. “He wanted to sleep with me before we were married.”
“Did you ever-”
“No. Never.” More wine. She was a little bit sleepy now, her eyelids very heavy. But she felt warm and comfortable in a way she had not felt in far too long. She was completely at ease now. The full night’s sleep, the good day of work at the shop, the sale of the black lacquered commode, the dinner, the presence of Megan, the wine “I should have,” she said suddenly. “I should have slept with him. Then maybe I would have known better than to marry him. But I was a scared little girl and I held out for that wedding ring, and we were married, and the wedding night was a fiasco. It was terrible.”
“Don’t think about it,” Megan said.
But she couldn’t help it.
She remembered that evening all too clearly. First the wedding, with no family present, just a scattering of his friends and those few acquaintances of hers from the office, and two school friends of hers who had also wound up in New York. No one else.
An afternoon wedding. A shower of rice, and then the trip in his car, speeding north out of the city and into Connecticut. He had arranged it all, had made reservations at a lodge called Hadrian’s, had planned everything without consulting her to any great degree. And he drove quickly, purposefully, as if he could not wait an extra moment to get her in a bedroom and steal her virginity.
She was terrified. She sat in the seat beside him, scarcely listening to the words he spoke, her mind on the night ahead of them. He would make love to her. They would be in a room together, shades drawn and door latched, and she-his wife now-would have to let him do as he pleased with her. At school she had known girls who let boys make love to them, but she had never been one of those girls. She did not know what it would be like and she could not imagine it without fearing it.
“I love you, kitten,” he told her. “And you’re my wife now. My wife.”
My wife. That was what he was saying, that she was his, that she belonged to him in the eyes of God and man. My wife. Not we are married but you’re my wife, as though the whole sacrament of marriage had been a specifically acquisitive act on his part.
“Tonight,” he said, speaking her thoughts. “I’ve waited a long time for you, sugar. I can’t wait much longer.”
But why did he have to talk about it? She couldn’t even think about it without trembling inside. Why did he have to talk about it?
Once he put an arm around her. “My baby,” he said. “My wife, my little girl.”
My, my, my. Possession, ownership. God!
Hadrian’s was a massive stone building, its decor suggestive of medieval England. The high ceilings were supported by rough oak beams, the walls paneled, the doors composed of wide boards highly polished. At another time she might have been captivated by the lodge, receptive to its atmosphere, but now it only conjured up images of a castle lord taking the chastity of a young serf according to the ancient droit du seigneur. His wife.
A gray-haired bellhop showed them to their room. A large room with a view of a patterned garden in the rear. A large room with heavy furniture and a massive bed that, in her frightened eyes, dominated the room utterly. She could not take her eyes off that bed. It fascinated and repelled her, like a snake in the eyes of a bird. She wished it were smaller or less imposing. As it was, it seemed slightly obscene.
And he mistook her feelings. He grinned and touched her arm. “That’s the bed, all right,” he said. “You’re getting excited just looking at it, aren’t you?” He squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry, sugar. We’ll be in it soon enough.”
They would be in it. She wanted to throw back her head and scream. This couldn’t be real, couldn’t be happening to her. And how could he think she was excited, how could he read her fear as passion? He didn’t know her at all. They were a pair of strangers united in a farce called matrimony and nothing good could come of it.
She was sure of this.
“You must be hungry,” he said. “We’ll eat first. The food is supposed to be excellent here. We’ll have dinner and then we can come back upstairs.”
A reprieve. She would have a meal first-that was his concession to her virginity. She would be appeased with food, fattened for the slaughter, then taken upstairs and possessed. How could he think that she was hungry? Didn’t he know her at all? Didn’t he have the slightest degree of sensitivity, of empathy?
Downstairs, they ate in a dining room with paneled walls and heavy furniture. There was no cloth on the table, just well-weathered old wood. The food could have been good or bad and she would not have known. She never tasted it. She sat across from him and tried to make conversation but could barely do that, and she ate without being aware of what she was eating.
Then he hurried her upstairs
He carried her over the threshold. He was a tall man, a strong man, and as he lifted her in his arms she thought that this ought to be giving her a sense of security. But it had the opposite effect. She felt so very small and weak that she wanted to cry out.
“I love you,” he said.
She couldn’t answer.
“Don’t be afraid-”
When she saw him nude for the first time she began to tremble visibly. She was afraid, she couldn’t look at him. The sight of him, and the feel of his eyes on her own bare flesh, and the huge bed looming at her.
He lay for a long time on the bed with her, his hands busy with her body. She felt him touch her, his hands on her breasts, her legs, and she thought that this was supposed to be awfully exciting. But all his games of love had the opposite effect of what he intended. Every touch made her quiver, not with passion but with fear and distaste. Every kiss made her just that more aware of what was to come.
And she began to realize that this was wrong, that there was something specifically wrong with her. A woman was not supposed to be revolted by her husband’s caresses. Fear might be normal, fear at the onset of love, fear of pain and fear of the unknown. All virgins were frightened at first. But what she felt was a great deal more than the normal fear and anxiety of a virgin bride. Much more.
Finally, it was time. She felt her whole body go rigid, resisting him with the passive determination of a follower of Gandhi, and she felt his hands, strong, sure of themselves. And then a sharp stab of pain that seared her flesh and blinded her and brought tears to her eyes. She gasped from the pain, and he seemed to take that gasp for evidence of long-dormant passion.
The pain ebbed gradually but not completely, so that there was a subtle background of pain as an accompaniment to everything that followed. She lay inert, a living corpse, feeling nothing but the pain, feeling none of the pleasurable sensations you were supposed to feel when the pain receded and the man you loved made sweet love to you.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
