“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yes. Just between you and me, ever since they put this monstrosity around my neck, I’ve thought of one thing, and one thing only. You.” Then she steps back and models her new look one more time. She asks brightly, “How do I look?”
“More beautiful than ever,” I say, and mean it.
“Please take me home.”
41
Early the next morning, I smell coffee, so I head down the hallway. I expect to find my wife in her usual spot, typing on her laptop, frantically catching up on work. But she’s not there. I pour myself some coffee, then wander back toward the bathroom. No Alice.
Then I see a strip of golden light emanating from the guest bedroom. I push the door open and see Alice standing in front of the full-length mirror, naked. Alice’s chin is held up firmly, her eyes focused on her reflection. Her neck remains motionless, locked in place, but her eyes shift to meet mine in the mirror. Her gaze is so direct, I feel unsettled. There is something undeniably pure—sculptural, even—about the collar around her throat. It molds perfectly to the bends and curves of Alice’s body, seamless where it hovers a few centimeters beyond her shoulders and chest. Instead of hiding or restricting her, it seems to be framing her beauty. Here in the faint golden light, I think I understand the purpose not only of the collar’s design but of The Pact itself: My wife stands before me, more present in the moment than I have ever seen her, completely undistracted, astonishingly resolute in her focus and direction.
I don’t know what to say. I stand between her and the mirror. Instinctively, I put my hands on the collar, moving my fingertips along the surface, then along the soft foam cupping her chin. Alice’s eyes remain trained on me. The tears from last night are gone, replaced by something else. A look of fascination? I hear Vivian’s voice in my head: “You need to make your peace with The Pact.”
“Somehow,” I say, “it makes you more mysterious.”
She steps forward to kiss me, but because she can’t lift her neck I have to bend at the knees to meet her mouth with my own.
I go to the corner and sit down in the chair by the window. She doesn’t move away from the mirror, and she doesn’t attempt to hide her nakedness from me. I don’t know that Alice has made her peace, but she does seem to be in another place. As we drove home last night, she seemed energized, although maybe she was just happy to be reunited. When I asked her to give me all the details of the trip, to leave nothing out, she simply said, “I survived.” Later, she told me she was proud of herself for pushing through it.
“The only thing that truly scares me,” she said, “the only thing that gets under my skin, is the unknown. The unknown terrifies me. Going into this, it was all completely unknown. I have this strange feeling of accomplishment, like I went into something utterly unpredictable and came out on the other end.”
“I’m proud of you too,” I said. “I feel like you did this for us. That means so much to me.”
“I did do it for us.”
After dinner, she just wanted to watch an episode of Sloganeering, eat ice cream, and retreat to the bedroom. I propped three pillows under her head to make her more comfortable. I thought she would be asleep in a matter of seconds, but she wasn’t. She pulled me close, holding on to me with a drowning grip. When I asked what she was thinking, she responded, “Nothing.” Which is what she always says when I ask what she’s thinking. Sometimes, I believe her. Other times, though, I know the wheels of her mind are spinning, and that’s the feeling I had at that moment: me on the outside, looking in.
Eventually, we had sex. I don’t know that I’d like to describe it here, though I will say it was unexpected, somewhat unusual. Alice seemed determined and, more than that—possessed. I wanted so badly to know what had happened to her in the desert. Instead I gave in to her passion, her persistence, to this uncanny iteration of Alice. My Alice, only different.
42
Alice takes the day off from work. Even though it’s Valentine’s Day, I’m more than a little surprised. I guess it makes sense. Her priorities have shifted. The Pact is working.
Of course, there are the practical concerns: She can’t find a suit or even a blouse that will fit around the collar, and besides, she hasn’t figured out how to explain it. She emails her paralegal, says the food poisoning has taken a turn for the worse, and that she’ll be out of the office for a day or two or three. When I call in to cancel my appointments for the second day in a row, Huang puts Evelyn on the line.
“Everything okay?” Evelyn wants to know.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Family emergency.” Evelyn doesn’t pry.
At first Alice seems a little antsy, like she doesn’t know what to do with herself, but by ten she seems happy to be free from work, a whole day spread out in front of us.
We take a walk down the beach. Alice wears her baggy coat and wraps a wool scarf around the collar. I bring the camera. When I go to snap a quick picture of her, she yells at me. “I don’t want a picture of me in this thing!”
“Come on.”
“Never!”
“Just one?” Alice pulls off the scarf and coat, revealing the collar. She looks straight at me and sticks out her tongue.
On the way home, she doesn’t even bother with the scarf or coat. I think she’s surprised when the people walking by don’t seem to notice or care. We stop by Safeway, and our cashier looks up as she finishes bagging our groceries. “Ouch,” she says. “Car accident?”
“Yes,” Alice says.
And that’s it. For the next thirty days, whenever someone comments on it, Alice simply says those two words: “Car accident.” That’s what she tells them at work, that’s what she tells our friends, that’s what she tells Ian and Evelyn and Huang when she comes by the office to fetch me for lunch—something she never made time for before. Sometimes, she’ll also add the sound of smashing cars and make a dramatic gesture with her hands. No one ever asks any follow-up questions. Except Huang. “Was it a Toyota Corolla or a Honda minivan?” he asked. “My money’s on the Corolla—worst drivers ever.”
I’ll be honest. Every time I glimpse the collar, or just glimpse my wife—sitting or standing upright, chin straight ahead—it makes me sense how committed she really is. Each night, I help her wash beneath the collar, running a warm, soapy washcloth over her skin, threading it between the fiberglass stays. As I watch her, as I cook for her, as I make love to her, as we hold hands in front of the television, what I never say to my wife, what I never confess, is this: Our marriage was my idea, my way of keeping her, yet here we are, just a few months into it, and she has already sacrificed so much more than I have.
43