Obedience

Elizabeth was turned away from him now, speaking into the pillow. De

“And a few years later she was dead,” Elizabeth went on. “Cervical cancer.”

“I’m sorry,” De

“Don’t be. If you had known her you wouldn’t have felt anything but a loss, like some sort of phantom pain. At her funeral, no one mentioned her years in San Francisco, those hippie parties. I never told anyone about what I had seen that night. It was just assumed that these things happen, you know. They happen. There is no randomness in the world. Everything falls into a certain pattern. My mother-she knew this. She called me once from the West Coast. She said, ‘Lizzie, I think I’ve been cursed.’ I didn’t say anything. I silently agreed with her, of course. She had been. Cursed with some sort of bitter disease. An obscene pleasure drive. An urge to fuck anything that moved. And it killed her. This is what I’ve inherited from her.”

De

“I was married before. Before I met Ed. I was studying at Cleveland State, working toward a master’s in psychology. My life was as good as it had ever been. I met this man who was unlike anyone I had ever met: sincere, loving. Magnificent. You would have liked him, De

“Would I?” De

“He was charming and sweet. Just like you. When he fucked me, it was for my pleasure, not just his. He didn’t want to come on my face or put his finger in my ass or watch me with another woman. He didn’t want to jerk off while I danced around in red leather. He was the type who spread roses over the bed. He took me to fancy restaurants all over Cleveland and introduced me to his friends at the office. I felt important, more than somebody’s decoration.”

“Do you feel like a decoration when you’re with him?” Him: it was their code for Dean Orman.

“Sometimes,” Elizabeth said, turning even farther away from De

“We were married in just a few weeks,” she said, her voice muffled in the blanket. “It was nothing, just a civil service with a justice of the peace. We thought our love was above marriage, that it was just something you do, a commitment that was expected by a petty society. Marriage was reserved for the weakhearted, the suspicious. Mike wore blue jeans and I wore a summer dress. My father was there, taking pictures with one of those disposable cameras. We were so happy.”

Mike, De

“Then, as it goes, things changed. Mike started working all the time. He became consumed with this project at work. Months and months of work. My mother’s curse would burn inside me, mock me, and for a long time I was sickened with myself. Disgusted by my own body. I dropped out of school and fell into a depression. I hated the fact of my own lust, absolutely hated it. When Mike was home I would ravish him, take him in my mouth and suck out everything he was, leave him raw and bleeding. Afterward, I would apologize and feel guilty about what I had done. But something had changed between us. There was some rift there, some sort of divide.”

She turned and glanced at him. Her eyes were slick and wet. Yet something was in them, some hint of a deeper knowledge. What is she doing? De

“The job got to him,” Elizabeth said. “He was under pressure all the time to finish a project of some sort. I can’t even remember what it was, that’s how important it must have been. Something to do with an animal project.”

“Animal project?” De

“No, not like that. Mike was in advertising. Now I remember what it was: Pollya

“Yes,” De

“He talked about her so much, this actress, that of course I got suspicious. I thought he was fucking her. By that time I was alone all day with nothing to do, and my imagination was free to go wild. Of course I realized how ridiculous it was for me to castigate him for something that may not have even been true.

“But it swelled and built. Blossomed inside me. The hate for this girl I had never seen. The possibilities ran through my mind like a snuff film. Mike on top of her, Mike behind her, Mike in her mouth. It was eating me from the inside out.

“Finally, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. When he got home one night I interrogated him about it. ‘I know you’ve been screwing that girl,’ I said. ‘What girl?’ he asked. ‘That actress, that bitch.’ He was flattened. He told me to calm down. Things escalated. He was hurt, I mean really hurt, by what I’d said. And his pain made my anger swell more, so that I was berating him and berating myself at the same time. His fake lust was my real lust, and I was scorning it, screaming at it to stop, to leave me be.

“‘You should calm down right now,’ Mike said to me. At some point he changed, became abrasive. But I couldn’t calm down. I was crazed, maniacal. My mother, my sex drive, the girl in the commercial-everything was coming to a head and I was powerless to stop it. ‘Calm down,’ he said again. And when I wouldn’t, he smacked me. It wasn’t hard. It was just a smack, just a light smack in the face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mouthed afterward. We sat on the couch together, and he cried, and I cried, knowing that it was over between us. The artifice of who I was trying to be in our marriage had been broken, and he had discovered my awful curse.”

“What did you do then?” De

She said, “I went back to Cinci

It took all of De

Afterward, she drove him back to the Tau house. It was early evening, a muddy twilight spreading across the campus. The Dekes were marching to the dining hall, the Sigs were out on the yard in their suits and ties, dates on their arms in glittering formal dresses, and the art kilns down the hill at the edge of Up Campus were glowing as they did every night at this time. She dropped him off at the corner of Winchester and Crane, so that the Taus would not see them together. She did not say good-bye; she didn’t need to. There was nothing more that needed to be said between them. It was just something that had happened, and now it was over.