SIX
Eventually, I had to admit that there was something wrong. But it took me a while. Touch-drunk from all the unaccustomed contact, I found myself able to fall asleep and stay that way for the first time since early adolescence. Forget sleeping pills; I'd discovered the real cure for insomnia—sex-induced coma.
Hunter started joking that it was usually the man who got tired out after making love. But I wasn't so much physically exhausted as emotionally satiated. For once in my life, my brain didn't kick into fretting mode the moment I lay down and closed my eyes. It was almost as though Hunter was taking me over by taking control—or maybe I was just learning to surrender.
But gradually, I became aware that there was no one sleeping beside me. Hunter's side of the bed was always empty when I went to sleep and unrumpled when I woke up. I saw signs of late-night feasting in the kitchen—dirty plates piled high in the sink, cardboard take-out containers in the garbage that hadn't been there the night before. For years, Hunter and I had agreed that he wouldn't bring meat into the apartment, but now he was binging after midnight on spare ribs and meatball grinders. To my sensitive nose, there was a faint, per sis-tent smell of dead flesh in our apartment, and even leaving the windows wide open didn't eradicate it. When I complained, Hunter laughed and said he'd have to remember to leave the garbage outside our front door.
He didn't apologize for breaking our agreement, and I didn't call him on it. I also didn't ask him why he was suddenly less fastidious about his person, and mine. He no longer avoided making love to me when I had my period—in fact, he reveled in the slippery, transgressive feel of it. While I had to admit that I liked this aspect of his newfound earthiness, I was less thrilled with his new habit of showering only every two or three days. His shaving became erratic as well, and my husband's dark stubble left red, raw marks on my face and inner thighs.
At night, I began to have vivid dreams that I could never quite remember. I knew when I first woke up that I had been in the midst of some complex drama, but all the details bled away as I came fully awake. I had vague impressions, though. A night sky in the country, brilliant with stars, the moon a huge, glowing orb until a dark cloud passed over it. My husband, pressing me down on the bed as I whimpered in fear. Malachy in his white lab coat, holding up a half-dead cat and instructing Sam, Lilliana, and Ofer that they were going to have to learn how to kill things. “Start small,” Malachy said, “with something wounded, like this fellow. Then keep challenging yourself. Go for something bigger. Work together to bring it down.” I raised my hand, asking: What about me?
“You're the bigger prey, of course,” Malachy explained, and everyone looked at me with renewed interest: Ah, yes, now we see it.
My inner life, I was discovering, was basically a B movie. Wouldn't my mother be proud.
Then, after a week of this, I had a dream that felt different from the others. I was back in the subway train. Pressed up against strangers, I could feel someone rubbing slowly against me. In real life, I would have been horrified and repulsed, but in this dream, the subtle touch against my back and bottom felt like waves lapping up against me, sensual and impersonal, anonymous and erotic. A male hand gripped my waist, and I thought, This is like that story by Ana?s Nin, about the woman and the stranger on the train, and I gave myself up to the illicit plea sure of it. As the stranger moved in sinuous motions against my backside, I felt my thoughts drifting to this faceless man, and then, without warning, I was that man, struggling to hold myself in check and to restrict myself to just this small necessary contact. I could feel my breathing quicken; I was losing control. And then I was back in my own body. I looked up and saw a barn owl perched on the handrail, swiveling its head a disconcerting 180 degrees to give me a long, slow wink. I realized that the man touching me wasn't a stranger—well, not a complete stranger, at any rate.
“Stop,” I said, trying to break free from his embrace. It felt as though recognizing him had broken some kind of spell.
“Hang on, sweetheart, I'm almost done,” came Red's response. He sounded like he'd been running hard.
“I don't think so,” I said, pushing him away. Behind me, I heard a woman gasp.
“He's written all over you,” said a woman, lifting my shirt up and peering at my bare back. In the dream's logic, it didn't seem peculiar that his touch had penetrated the fabric of my clothing. It didn't seem strange that I could suddenly see myself from above, my back covered with scarlet designs, like an aboriginal story or a shamanistic spell.
I came instantly awake, alone in the bed. The bedside clock read three A.M., and it was still completely dark outside. Swinging my feet from the bed, I padded down the hall.
“Hunter? Are you up?” As I checked the apartment for my husband, I wondered why I was having erotic dreams about a scruffy redneck when the only man I'd ever wanted was finally turning to me the way I'd always hoped he would.
But Hunter wasn't home, and though I went back to bed and forced myself to remain there, I didn't sleep any more that night. It was only in the morning, when I stepped into the shower, that I noticed the fading red marks on my back. I knew they were simply the imprint of the wrinkled sheets on my skin, but for a moment, in the mirror, they resembled arcane symbols.
Hunter came home just as I was leaving for work, looking sweaty and disheveled. He had gotten up early, he said, to go running.
To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it's difficult to get someone to understand something when her marriage depends on her not understanding it. But even I was coming to recognize that a few short weeks after it had begun, my second honeymoon was coming to an end.
Still, I allowed myself to pretend for a little while longer that I didn't know why it was ending.