I shrug, I don’t have any preference. Henry is energized by the sweet, lilting breeze. He bounces on the balls of his feet. His hands rub across my back, between my shoulder blades and work their way down.
I inch myself out of his grasp and give him a too bright smile. I owe him this. I feel guilty for not accepting this house, this countryside escape, as the gift he means it to be. Of everything he can offer me, I should be grateful, but I’m not. I’m edgy and unsettled and I watch Henry’s arm flexing under his shirt and try to take deep quiet breaths. Henry’s need to paint last night with a rosy brush and make it all perfect is suffocating.
“I think I’m going for a walk.”
“A walk?” His mouth opens and closes, like a fish around a hook.
“Isn’t that what country folk do? They walk. And knit? Something like that,” I murmur with a flick of my wrist. I’m being deliberately dismissive and his eyes cloud with confusion. Before he can stop me, I wave gaily and head down the steps, my feet clattering on the wood.
Outside, I should be able to breathe again, but I can’t. My lungs feel like they are going to burst. I’d be the first person to suffocate in open air, choked to death by the stench of cow manure.
I remember our very first fight, after our wedding, when Henry started to change from suitor to husband, that elastic period when my head was still spinning. We’d been to a party, they all blended together but this one was for a colleague’s retirement. They had sickly sweet cocktails with a deceptive amount of alcohol and I drank until the room spun. The night blurred together until I couldn’t be sure in retrospect what was sequential. I got caught in a conversation with a man and a woman, the woman, blonde and beautiful in a short black silk dress, her hair carelessly piled up in a sexy bun, her makeup an ad for “barely there.” I felt overdressed and overly made up, in my sequined green gown and crystal heels. She laughed and touched my shoulder, called me a member of Henry’s Harem, unaware that we were married, despite the large rings—plural—on my finger. With a thick tongue, I kept trying to insert my status, my husband, have you seen him? Henry had disappeared for hours, lost in the throng.
She linked arms with me, her name was Cynthia, she’d said, and guided me to the bathroom. While I listened to her tell me, mean and incisive, through the stall divider all the ways I would never be one of them, I pressed my cheek against the cold marble of the stall door. She left me in the bathroom, where I vomited up the rest of the cocktails.
Later I found the man we’d been talking to, his name was Reid, Henry’s junior assistant. Baby-faced and kind, he was a sucker for mascara-streaked faces. He got me water, helped me look for Henry.
He found Henry smoking a cigar at the bar, the center of a circle of men I hadn’t met. Henry gave me a chilly smile and didn’t invite me in, didn’t pull me into the group, introduce me. He left me on the outside and, with calm precision, he turned his back. That was the first time I’d seen what being on the outside of Henry’s circles could do. Every cruel word that Cynthia had uttered through that stall door had been rubber-stamped by Henry himself.
I left alone. Took a cab back to our apartment and fell asleep on the couch. Henry came home, turned on every light in the place. I tried to tell him about Cynthia. About how I looked for him for what felt like hours and he waited, very still, for me to finish. Then he smiled. “The next time you want to spend the night flirting with a man half my age, you won’t be welcome back here.”
The next day, we flew to Musha Cay. A suitcase full of clothes I’d never seen before, complete with string bikinis and linen skirts. Tropical drinks and expansive, private beaches. Nude sunbathing. Long days on white, gleaming yachts full of people I didn’t know. It took four days for me to forget the blackness of his eyes. Four days of tropical bouquets and fresh island fruit delivered in bed. Four days for the heat of his mouth on my body to replace the chill of his smile, as he showed me the life he would give me. All for the small price of forgiveness.
The “corner” store is a mile away and the walk feels good—it slows my thumping heart.
When I push open the door to the store, a bell tinkles overhead. The cashier is round and in her late thirties, perched on a backless stool, reading a year-old People magazine. At the sound of the bell, she drops the magazine and gives me a motherly smile.
“Well, hello!”
“Hi.” I’m not used to friendliness; it feels invasive. “I’m looking for venison steaks.”
“Oh, sure! Are you new in town?”