“There’s someone moving in across the street.”
“I know. I saw him when I was upstairs. It looks like it’s just some guy moving in by himself.”
“He didn’t see you, did he? I mean, you had some clothes on, didn’t you?”
“If he can see through the blinds, two stories up, in the daytime, then he’s Superman.”
“In other words, you didn’t have a shirt on?”
“Relax, nobody saw me.”
She thought about the way the new neighbor had looked up at the window and another cold chill ran over her.
“Well, do you think maybe we should go introduce ourselves?”
“I guess that means you don’t want to fuck me?”
“Sarah, is that all you think about?”
He had concern in his voice when he asked the question, as if he thought Sarah was crazy, some kind of nymphomaniac. Josh had asked her many times in the past if she’d ever been sexually assaulted or abused. He had almost insisted that she had been. It was the only explanation he could think of for her powerful sex drive, using his self-help-book psychology. Men always figured that a woman had to be damaged in some way if she had a stronger libido than theirs. It was one of those male-chauvinist things that pissed Sarah off.
Josh was even worse than most men when it came to that because he himself had been molested as a child. He had told her about it once and then made her promise never to bring it up again. He had been one of the apparent thousands of young boys who had been molested by a priest. His mother had sent him to Bible camp for the summer and one of the camp counselors, a popular young priest, had dragged him out into the woods every night for eight weeks. The camp counselors would tell all the kids what to say in their letters home and then read each one before they mailed them, destroying any that mentioned sexual abuse or any displeasure at being at the camp at all. They had all apparently been in on it.
Josh had come home and told his parents. They had freaked out and sent him to a home for troubled kids, where he’d been abused again by one of the older boys who’d anally raped him at knifepoint and one of the youth counselors had forced him to perform oral sex. This time he told no one. Eventually, he had his growth spurt and beat the hell out of the older kid. The counselor had left him alone then too.
Nothing happened to the priest who’d started it all. He got away with what he’d done for twenty years, and then one day they’d been watching TV when his picture had flashed on the screen, along with a story about how he’d been accused of molesting young boys going back more than a dozen years.
“More than
“How can you believe in a God who would let his own representatives do this? If he does exist, he might as well not exist for all the difference it makes.”
“God had nothing to do with that,” Josh said.
“But I thought God had something to do with everything?”
“He didn’t have shit to do with that! That was just a man. One sick, twisted, evil man.”
“But didn’t God create the man?”
“God gave man free will.”
“How can there be free will if God is all-knowing? If God already knows everything you will ever do from birth to death before he ever creates you, then he created you specifically to do those things because he could have not created you or created you with a different nature. I’m just saying, an omniscient creator and free will are sort of incompatible concepts. Omniscience is more compatible with determinism.”
“You’re going to have to dumb it down for me a little. I didn’t go to graduate school. But it sounds to me like you’re saying that God wanted me to be raped by a priest? Is that what the fuck you’re saying?”
That discussion hadn’t gone well. They never did. Sarah had tried to discuss his religious beliefs with him a few times but they had all turned rather nasty and ended in shouting matches. Eventually, they had agreed that that subject was taboo, as was any discussion of his molestation. And Josh had slowly begun to open up more and more sexually under her patient guidance and coaxing. Sarah had enjoyed the challenge. It had fed her own need for control.
Sarah had always enjoyed making men uncomfortable with her wantonness, and even knowing the reasons for Josh’s rather conservative attitude toward sex, she still enjoyed teasing him and rarely felt guilty about it even though she knew she should have. Much of her sexuality was an act anyway. If Josh had sex with her every time she asked for it she’d have stopped asking. She considered it a sort of protest against the double standard. A man who wanted sex all the time was a stud. A woman who liked sex was some kind of slut or a victim. And sex abuse aside, she knew that Josh felt the same way. This was just one more annoying manifestation of Josh’s puritanical Catholic upbringing that Sarah had yet to adjust to.
“After barely seeing you all week? Yeah, fucking you is all I can think about. When I stop thinking about fucking you, start worrying.”
She knew that Josh didn’t think it was ladylike for a woman to say “fuck.” It was one of those things he’d learned to get used to. Sarah even suspected that it secretly turned him on. She was so different than his friends’ wives. She was more like the wives in
Sarah shoveled the eggs into her mouth along with the rest of the bacon and then stood up, still chewing. She walked over to the garbage can and scraped the pancakes off the plate into the trash.
“Hey!”
“I love you, honey. But there’s no way I’m eatin’ that shit. I do appreciate it though. You’re sweet for trying.”
“Thanks. Sweet is exactly what I was going for.”
He looked truly hurt. He looked down at his own plate full of burned pancakes, then walked over to the garbage and tossed his uneaten breakfast in as well.
“Oh, well. I tried.”
“And I love you for it.”
Sarah stood up on her tiptoes and kissed Josh on the cheek. Josh was not a small man. He was six foot four and over 250 pounds. He’d played hockey in college and had once had aspirations of making an NHL team. That was until he’d lost his athletic scholarship and had to admit that he didn’t have a hockey player’s killer instinct. He still played hockey on the weekends whenever he didn’t have to work or when Sarah didn’t nag him into staying home with her, which she did often. After he’d worked all week, if he finally got a weekend off, she didn’t want him spending it chasing a bunch of men up and down the ice with a stick. She wanted him all to herself. She knew it was selfish and she ought to have felt guilty about it but she didn’t. Sometimes she tried to be supportive and went to watch him play. The hotel he worked at sponsored their league and they played against other hotels, bars, and strip clubs that all had their own teams. Sarah knew that it made Josh feel great to compete in those games. It was the closest to the NHL he’d ever get. And it was a good excuse for him to stay in shape. His size and muscles made Sarah feel safe and when he hugged her she felt like a child again, without a care in the world.
“Okay, I’ll go put some clothes on and we’ll go say hi to another neighbor that we’ll probably never speak to again as long as we live here. But when we come back in I’m going to fuck you like I paid for you.” She smiled mischievously, then skipped up the stairs.
Upstairs in the bedroom, Sarah began to sweat. Her hands shook as she reached for the T-shirt. She was shrugging into a pair of jeans and almost fell over. Her legs were trembling.
She began to hyperventilate. The room tilted and whirled like a carnival ride.
She held on to the closet shelves and took deep breaths, waiting for the moment to pass. She thought about calling Josh but her pride prevented her. Sarah didn’t want her husband to think she was weak. She had always been afraid to show weakness around him or any man. She considered herself the rock of the relationship. She was the strong, steady one, the one who never worried, never panicked, never flipped out no matter how difficult things got. Josh was the one who panicked whenever they were late paying a phone bill and rushed to the doctors whenever he had a cough or a stomachache. Sarah always kidded her husband about being a hypochondriac. The
