“He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t change expression, he didn’t even check to see where I’d landed, just kept talking. Didn’t miss a beat. I lay half on and half off the rug, thinking, Oh, I have a run in my hose, and trying to figure out why I couldn’t get my breath, and he just kept talking. And when he put the phone down, he smiled and said, Hi honey, what are you doing down there? It was so… so confusing, and he seemed so concerned, that I couldn’t put it together. His reality and mine.”
When she’d got her breath back, she told him he’d hit her—but she was hesitant about it—and he said, Oh, I must have caught you in the stomach with my elbow—you should never sneak up on me that way, honey—I’m really sorry I hurt you. And a portfolio of biotech stock appeared in her name the next day. She was bewildered: was it possible he really believed he hadn’t punched her? Had he? Was she mistaken?
He started to talk about her joining him in business partnership in a few months, about her bringing her things from Atlanta. Their sex became more adventurous; lots of fantasy role-play. Their schedule—all in the analysis stage, now, and done in the loft—was hectic, and sometimes they didn’t sleep for thirty hours at a time, and even when they did sleep it was at odd times of the day; their meals were ordered in, and erratic.
“I didn’t know, sometimes, what time of day or night it was, or even what day of the week. There’s no windows in that place, except the bedroom, and he’s got those covered in this slippery gray plastic stuff. The outside world started to feel weird. My watch had disappeared that first week, so I only ever knew what time it was when I asked Geordie, and sometimes what he told me didn’t make any sense. What?”
“Nothing.” I understood, now, what had been so odd about that loft: no clocks. Even the VCR and microwave displays read 88:88. And there had been no radio tuner on the music system, heavy drapes closed in the daytime bedroom, no phones. “Go on.”
“It was surreal. He’d sometimes stop in the middle of talking about foot traffic patterns and shopper penetration zones and say… weird stuff, like ‘Women are lesser beings,’ and he sounded so, I don’t know, so earnest and reasonable, that I just… I ended up agreeing with him.”
That, she said, was when their sex play went from make-believe bondage to using silk scarves, which became rope, and then chains. One time he chained her up and teased her sexually for hours until she was crying out, screaming, begging him to give her an orgasm, and he just goaded her into saying more and more humiliating things, explicit things, until he finally let her come and come again. “And I liked it,” she said, half defiant, half ashamed.
I kept my expression vaguely concerned.
“What I didn’t know was that he had the whole thing on tape. He played it for me one day—it could have been morning, it could have been the middle of the night—when we were eating breakfast. Have you ever watched yourself having sex? It’s…” She closed her eyes for a moment. Her head was almost wholly in shadow, black against the stained sky. Uncertain firelight, a softer orange, made the shadows dance and sway, so that her face looked hollowed and old. She opened her eyes. “You don’t look like a person, you look like a thing, a wiggling white thing, dripping with sweat, drooling, face all swollen. The audio makes it worse. I looked at that video and hated myself. And Geordie smiled, and said something like, Imagine if your family and friends got their hands on this! And then he went back to eating his scrambled eggs and asked me to pour him some more tomato juice. And I did.”
After that, things got worse. He acted as though they were still partners, equals. She didn’t know up from down. He even began to seem sort of fatherly. “That’s when he told me about the girl in Arkansas. He called her his wife-in-training.”
She played with the cheap watch we’d bought in New Jersey, the one she never took off. My bottle was empty, hers barely touched. It would only delay her, and my dinner, if I asked if I could have it, so I lay down again on the grass and breathed its scent, green and vital and unspoilt. The fire burned cleanly now, bright in the gathering dusk, and the wind in the trees whispered back and forth. The whispering grew, and was suddenly shot through with myriad tweets and twitters. I sat up.
“Oh,” Tammy said, as a thousand red-breasted grosbeaks settled like feathery locusts in the trees surrounding the clearing. The air shivered with their flutter and preen, and their calls sounded like the metallic squeaks of a thousand rusty water pump handles. After a while the noise died to an occasional squeak or flutter as they settled for the night.
“Where did they come from?”
“The north. They’re migrating. Tomorrow they’ll be on their way again, after they eat all the high-lipid berries and unwary insects in sight.” Asset strippers. But she wasn’t interested in the birds, just in avoiding talking. “So,” I said.
She pretended to be busy watching the trees.
“You were talking about his wife-in-training. That’s an odd phrase.”
She muttered something.
“What?”
“I said, he meant it literally. Her name is Luz. She’s nine years old.”
I knew I didn’t want to hear this.
“He bought her in Mexico City two years ago. She was seven. Her mother was a prostitute, and her brother and sister. Or maybe they were dead. Geordie said she’d still be on the street if he hadn’t… if he hadn’t rescued her. He said they flock like birds, the kids there. Gangs of them, running around wild on the streets. He adopted her but she’s being fostered by someone else. That was the hardest part, he said, finding just the right family. He seemed so proud of it, the way people talk about the dream house they’re having built. You know: they tell you when they first got the idea for something, what sparked it, even where they were; they go on and on about how they picked the architect and the builder, how they found the land and beat all the obstacles, the building permits, getting the utilities connected, what they did when they found out that what they’d figured was bedrock wasn’t. Jesus, I hate people like that. Anyhow, he found a couple in the Bible Belt, an hour’s drive from Little Rock, and he paid them a lot of money—a lot in their terms, he said—to school her at home in traditional values, to teach her to cook and sew and obey her future husband, to keep her away from the influence of TV and video and the web, even books. She had enough English now, he said, to read from the Bible. He pays the couple to keep their mouths shut. She’s nine now. Very pretty, very sweet, he said; he’s been to see her twice. Real healthy, and smart. When she gets to be fourteen—a well-trained, brainwashed fourteen—he’ll take her to Georgia or someplace and marry her. And she’ll belong to him totally. She’s already trained to think he can do what he wants with her, he said. If she even squeaks, all he has to do is divorce her and she’ll be kicked back to Mexico, still a teenager. No family, no money, no job, nothing. She’d probably be dead in a few years. And you know what? It’s true, pretty much. He can do all that. It’s legal. He liked telling me that part. He didn’t apply for citizenship, and because she’s a minor she wouldn’t even really be a legal resident. If he divorced her at fifteen, she’d be shipped off and no one would care.”
No one cared now.
I stared up and back at the trees behind me. Here was a smart, good-looking woman who had grown up in the last quarter of the twentieth century, yet she had been reduced to nothing more than a shell in just three months. She had allowed herself to be raped, and beaten, and humiliated. She had let him convince her she was crazy. Three months. And even after learning what this man was doing to a child, she had stayed. She had had a key, and money, and Dornan, who loved her, and she had stayed. I didn’t understand at all.