We were drinking still and smoking when the phone rang. And my instinct was not to answer, except for knowing it was Beth.
I picked it up and she said, “I just wanted to make sure you’re all right.”
I walked the phone into the bedroom, closed the door to Ingrid, but I still couldn’t shift gears so fast. I felt the jerky guiltiness in my voice when I said, “I’m okay, really.” And everything about the way I was speaking made plain my impatience. She couldn’t know why, just sounded sort of confused, and what she wound up saying was, “Tomorrow, why don’t you come later than we said.”
“When?”
“Six, I guess. That would be better I think. I have a full day and…”
She didn’t bother to finish as if she remembered who she was talking to.
“Six is fine,” I said. “I have some things to do, too,” and I didn’t know why I said this last thing and wished I hadn’t.
“Oh,” she said. “All right. Six, then.” And I felt her lingering and it felt brutish to edge toward hanging up, but in another awful way it seemed to be working in my favor.
“Okay, I’ll see you then,” I said.
I hung up the phone and went back to Ingrid. She still sat on the couch, smoking a cigarette, staring at her drink on the coffee table.
“Who was that?” she said like she’d had years of practice, which of course she had.
It startled us both. Her more than me because she quickly said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I asked that. It’s none of my business.”
I didn’t attempt to explain, though a part of me wanted to. Here I was again with all this inside me I wanted to say but with the absolute wrong person to tell it to.
Instead I held out my hand and she took it. We went into the bedroom, me not knowing who or what I wanted exactly. I only knew too clearly it was Beth who’d started me needing and then changed the shape of the need.
Ingrid and I lay down together. It seemed at first that it might be like last night, with us just laying around. And, in a strange way, recognizing this – that this might be what I most wanted from Beth, or would’ve tonight – drove me past it. I couldn’t lay there thinking about her, about Beth. If I did it might start me crying again. Crying from that place I didn’t understand, and that’d give Ingrid all the wrong sorts of ideas about me. I’d be the last thing she’d want.
I undressed her and then undressed myself and she turned the covers down. She must’ve made the bed. I stood there, wondering at what I was doing. Not just this minute but with the whole of my life. Wondering how in hell I’d come here and from where.
These thoughts must’ve stopped me entirely because I heard Ingrid’s voice. Heard her say, “Nina, what is it? What’s the matter?”
I discovered myself standing stock still by the bed, but breathing hard, wishing I’d told her my real name because maybe then I would’ve felt like we knew each other.
“Nothing,” I said as I got into bed with her. But it wasn’t going to work. I could tell this already. I couldn’t get rid of all the things I was thinking. And when she began to touch me, at first just my neck, stroking a line under my jaw, I knew I’d never keep from feeling things either. And so with neither my mind nor my body a safe place to be, I looked to her body. Turned toward her and began touching her in return, and for a short while this worked.
I began to kiss her shoulders and then her breasts. Did these things until all I felt was her and not me. And this lasted until I pulled the covers back, saw the bruises on her side, by now purple and still reddish.
The sight of them caught me up, nearly stopped me. For an instant it ran through my mind to ask how it had happened. But I knew this, too, was about me, about keeping me from myself. And I knew it wouldn’t work. Besides, I knew exactly how she’d come to be hurt in this way. I could see it all – her on the floor and him kicking her. And I knew that the times I’d had this done to me I’d felt the least human of all.
To make her revisit it just to spare myself, this seemed close to something he’d do. Instead I put a pillow behind her so she wouldn’t have to lay flat. She sank into it while I wrapped my arm around her thigh.
I kissed her for ever, her belly, her thighs, and I could feel her hands in my hair. Could hear her saying little things. Murmuring in a way I couldn’t make out and didn’t quite want to – afraid it might sound too much like what Beth said. And if they were both saying the same kinds of things, how could I believe either one of them? How could it be any more than the things people say when they’re together like this? And this was made all the more tangled by my wanting to believe Beth but not Ingrid.
So, in this way, I came back to Beth just as I got inside Ingrid. I listened to Ingrid now because it was only sounds and breath, and my own breathing changed but not in the right way. I had to take my mouth from her, and just fuck her. Fuck her, while I tried to choke off my own sounds because they might end up in sobs if I didn’t get hold of myself.
Ingrid tried to turn – first toward her bruises but crying out some when that hurt, and so toward me. I pulled out another pillow. Let her on to her stomach. I got myself up and behind her. Put my hand back inside her, and her asking all this time now for more of me, of my hand.
I grew afraid of myself in this, afraid I’d get carried away, carried off to where she wanted me to go and then I stopped worrying.
I fucked her until she was the one crying – out of a place I both knew and didn’t because usually when she got here she stayed silent and away from me. But this time, when I was starting to stop, she cried at me to keep on. She said, “Please, don’t. Please don’t leave me.”
She’d never said anything like this and so I listened. I put my hand further into her and held it there, kept trying to get further inside. She held herself very still, and then I did this, too – I held still and held my hand still, still and deep.
I stayed like this until she turned again. Turned toward me, and her face looked a way I’d never seen. She looked young and afraid and I opened my arms and she came to me.
It was a long time before she quieted. I felt helpless. I thought of all the stupid things to do – bring her a drink, a cigarette. I kept myself from doing these things until she got to a place of wanting me to. Then I was glad to have actual tasks. To be able to get up from that bed.
I brought these things back with me – the bottle, our glasses. Made a separate trip for the cigarettes just to have more time with myself. I tried to drink the way she did, in the long swallows that were helping her, but for me it just brought back the choking. And the cigarette I tried did this, too, even more. I stubbed it out halfway finished, and that’s when she noticed me.
She curled up near me and put her hand between my legs and I lay back. I opened my legs because she told me to.
She stroked me and stroked me and I felt a calmness begin near her hand and then follow it. She trailed her fingers up my body to my throat and back down. Beth had done this too, and so I wondered: what is it about me that lets women know to do this?
My breathing grew steadier and deeper and she talked to me in a way that said nothing. She said things like, “There, now. You’re all right. Darling, everything’s all right.” And I could see that it wasn’t, because I’d begun to believe her.
When she put her hand in me I couldn’t be anywhere else but with her. I couldn’t do anything but feel what she was doing. And it was all slow and gentle and I wanted more of her than I could take. Tried hard to ask for her but now I was the one who could only make sounds and cries.