The Better to Hold You (13 page)

Now my credulity was stretched past the breaking point. “I’m sorry, are you saying that magic is a catalyst for this virus?”

“Magda showed me that a belief in science and a belief in magic don’t have to be mutually exclusive. There are just different kinds of truths, Abs. Old places—wild places—she says they can unlock things inside of us, just like art can. Or poetry.”

According to this version of reality, I understood, I was the passionless, literal geek, while Magda was the lyrical sorceress. I didn’t bother trying to argue my case. Instead, I thought of Hunter hunched over the computer, passionately frustrated, and realized what his sudden sexual hunger had been. A tantrum. A venting of pent-up emotions that had nothing to do with me. My soup was growing cold; I stirred it, but couldn’t force myself to taste it. “So you’re leaving me for that woman. Magda.”

“No, Abs.” Hunter smiled, and for the first time in our relationship, I thought about his mother’s mental illness, and how much of it she might have passed down to her son. “Right in Northside, where my family’s house is, there’s old-growth woods. And legends about werewolves dating back to the early settlers. Hell, some stories probably come down from the Indian tribes who lived there.” Hunter tore off another hunk of bread as Pascal the waiter arrived with the wine. Hunter continued his discourse, oblivious as Pascal went through the ritual of uncorking.

Visibly irritated by Hunter’s disregard of him, Pascal poured the wine into my glass first. “Madame?”

“It’s fine,” I said, barely tasting it.

“Great, thanks,” Hunter told Pascal, not looking up at him. Then he threw back half the goblet in one huge swallow. “Anyway, that’s where I need to be.” Hunter leaned forward, fingers drumming on the table, longing, no doubt, for a cigarette to hold.

“In Northside? You want to live in that big old house in Northside?” I was still trying to get to the buried body in this conversation. He had given me the name of the other woman; he had told me he longed to be back in Transylvania. I couldn’t quite believe that Northside and myself were anything but a poor substitute.

Hunter drank his glass of water down, audibly swallowing. I had never seen him display such poor table manners. As he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, I wondered how drunk he was.

“I don’t want to work for Magdalena. In her territory, she’s boss. I want to make my own way, Abra. And Northside is as good a place as any to start. Ever since he remarried and moved to Arizona, my dad hasn’t spent any time there, and he says he’d rather have me looking after it than the caretaker he’s got now. I can write there, and do research. I’ll have space, and nature around me. And it’s only two hours from you. We can visit each other.”

This, at least, made sense. I didn’t entirely believe he loved me more than he loved this other woman who had so captured his imagination. But I did believe that he would not choose to be a follower, not even for love. I drank some wine, slowly. I wanted to slow Hunter down, slow everything down. The hum of other people’s meals and lives and celebrations seemed to be growing louder. I took a deep breath. “When are you leaving?”

“I’d like to leave in a week.” Hunter paused, as if he’d just noticed that we were having different conversations. And that only his was happy. “Abs? Abs, why are you crying?”

“Because I thought you were leaving me.”

“Oh, sweetheart, no,” said Hunter, misunderstanding. “I’m not leaving you. This is just like one of my research trips. Except I’ll be able to see you more often. Oh, Abs, come on, cheer up. I love you, woman.” He leaned across the table and kissed me on the lips. “Now, cheer up! I command you.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” I started to laugh, tears still running down my cheeks. I never make scenes in restaurants. Well, except for that day. At first, the relief was so great that I felt a great surge of appetite and began to eat my cold soup, started tearing great chunks out of the bread and stuffing them in my mouth. It was only afterward, when we began to discuss the details of his move over his rabbit and my artichokes, that I realized what had happened.

I’d been so braced for news of an affair, of some final break, that I’d felt relieved when Hunter had said that all he wanted was to move to Northside. And he, misinterpreting my tears of relief for tears of sadness, had tried to reassure me that we weren’t really separating.

But the truth was, we were, because we would not be living together for some time. When a marriage is as generous with distance as ours had always been, it can be hard to distinguish a real parting of ways. But as Hunter and I went over the details of relocation—how much money was to be allocated for city expenses, how much for Hunter to purchase a car, and so on—it hit me that we were, in effect, negotiating a breakup.

I looked at Hunter, who had finished amputating the rabbit’s leg and was now happily chewing on a chunk of its thigh. “I suppose we won’t be seeing too much of each other over Christmas this year.”

“You’ll get time off for good behavior, won’t you? And we’ll see each other most weekends.”

I didn’t have most weekends free, though; I had only one day, at best. And I didn’t have a car. The nearest train stopped forty minutes from Hunter’s family’s house. That made it an almost three-hour commute. One way.

Hunter reached for my hand. “You could always come with me.”

I felt as though I were having an operation and people were pretending my internal organs weren’t hanging outside. “But I can’t.”

“So we’ll see each other whenever we can. Don’t worry.” Hunter signaled Pascal the waiter for our check without asking if I wanted dessert. When we got home, I discovered that my mascara had smeared from crying, giving me raccoon eyes. Liquored up and elated over his new future, Hunter went straight to bed for a change and fell asleep almost instantly, facing the window, probably dreaming of escape.

At three A.M. I stopped watching him.

Once I admitted it to myself, it was all I could think about. My marriage was being restructured and relocated. My husband was letting me go. And while my moods were swinging wildly between depression and anxiety, I tried to act as though I were at peace with Hunter’s decision.

I didn’t want to drive him away any faster than he was already going.

Maybe it would have been better if I’d let myself rage at him, but I was too frightened. I don’t fall in love easily. I don’t even fall in like very often. And I’d given so much of myself to Hunter that I didn’t know how much of me would be left when he was gone. I wouldn’t even be able to console myself with sleep, the way other depressed people do. I would sit up with the furniture, watching my familiar things become shadowy and strange the way things do when you pass the witching hours of fatigue and solitude and are still awake.

And there was nobody to tell this to. My father, who remembered Hunter as a cocky twenty-one-year-old with a goatee and a lot of unexamined ideas about American cinema, wholly disapproved of my husband. It was the one thing he and my mother agreed on, although my father believed it was in poor taste to say anything more than, “Well, you know how I feel on that subject.” The way he said this, however, implied a loathing so deep and pervasive that it defied language. For a while, my mother tried imitating him, but then she couldn’t stop herself from going on. And on.

As for female friends, well, I couldn’t see turning to Lilliana. We had only been friends for a few months, but I could already tell that in Lilli’s version of reality, men were easier to come by than career opportunities. My situation was a bit different. During my college and postgrad years, when most women meet more eligible partners than they will at any other time, I had encountered only three men who were interested in me: a brilliant math and music major with poor people skills, a good friend going through a bad time, and Hunter.

I couldn’t confide in Malachy or Sam or Ofer, and Malachy, while he knew about my husband’s exposure to the lycanthropy virus, was of questionable sanity himself. Too much time had passed to call my small crowd of high school friends.

I began trying to find a way out: There had to be a cure. Hunter had said, “You can always come with me.” But that wasn’t a real option, not unless I wanted to give up AMI and everything that gave my life meaning.

Except for Hunter, of course.

The next day I called in sick and went to the bookstore. I was looking for An Answer, but of course there were lots of Answers: Letting Loose, Holding On, The Leap of Faith, Making Him Want to Change, Making Change Work, Changing the Way You Love, Understanding the Alpha Male.

I picked up this last, figuring it had been misfiled: Surely Alpha Males belonged in the animal category? Could there be a special self-help section for Women Who Loved Lycanthropes? According to this author, though, we were all animals.

Is your mate an Alpha Male? Take this test.

1. Would your mate describe himself as

A) team player

B) One of the guys

C) A highly autonomous individual with leadership capabilities

D) Your lapdog

2. When confronted with a major life choice, does your man

A) Ask your advice

B) Ask an expert’s opinion

C) Tell you and the expert what’s wrong with both of you

D) Pant and whine

3. When driving, if cut off by another car, does your mate

A) Curse and yell

B) Pursue the offending vehicle very closely and then swerve off at the last possible moment before impact

C) Physically assault the small dog sitting in the other driver’s lap

D) Shake uncontrollably, often losing control of his bladder

I assumed that anyone who answered D) was probably a shih tzu. There were a few more multiple-choice questions designed to ascertain if the woman reader was an Alpha, Beta, or Gamma Female. I was an Alpha, just barely, because of a high score of autonomy (willing to see a movie alone, does not need mate’s advice to select clothes). As an Alpha Female, however, I needed to work on “asserting my right to submit.”

Do not think of submission as surrender. Instead, think of it as a choice—an assertive female knows she is strong enough to submit when it serves her needs. Traditionally, women have understood that their greater emotional intelligence, often called intuition, actually makes them stronger than men—strong enough to back down. In any pack, you will see that the Alpha Male is dominant over the Alpha Female, with the exception of the period of intense initial sexual courtship and the postpartum period. At these times, the male caters to his mate; otherwise, the female uses her enhanced social abilities to hold the family unit together.

It was pseudo-scientific bull. It was absurdly atavistic. And I couldn’t put it down.

If you, as a woman, decide that you desire to hold on to your mate with the long-term goal of producing viable offspring, you should understand that you will need to know when, and how, to submit. If during moments of key pack decision-making (when to move to a new hunting ground, for example) you assert your will, you will be setting yourself up as rival, not mate. Be aware of your enhanced capacity for emotional compromise, and remember that there will also be times (postpartum, for example, or during enhanced periods of sexual connection) when you can expect your man to submit to your will.

I finished reading the book at home. Hunter was out, buying a secondhand car. He came back in the late afternoon, and threw his keys and briefcase on the table.

“Success?”

“Success.”

“What kind?”

“Ford Explorer, three years old.” He pulled out the purchase agreement to show me the particulars: CD player, front air bags, enough miles on it to qualify it for early retirement.

“It’s been driven a lot.”

“Yeah, but it’s in great shape, and it has a sunroof.”

“That won’t mean much if it’s in the shop all the time. Did you look at a Consumer Reports? And didn’t those cars have something wrong with the tires?”

“Christ, you sure know how to take the fun out of things. It’s a fucking car. Don’t make a doctoral project out of it.”

I picked up my book. “Fine. It’s going to be your car, you’re going to be the one driving it. It won’t really affect me at all.”

“Oh, so that’s what this is all about. You’re going to start laying some guilt trip on me about going. Look, I’ve already said you can come with me if you want—”

I put the book down to glare at him. “Which you know I can’t do!”

Hunter turned away from me and began looking over the purchase papers. “Well, that’s not my fault. I don’t see you giving up your work to be with me, so don’t ask me to do it for you.”

We talked again, at seven-thirty, to decide what to order for dinner, and ate separated by walls of paperwork. At twelve Hunter went in to bed without saying good night, and I took the opportunity to cry, shave my legs, and apply a facial mask. In all the women’s magazines it says to pamper yourself when you feel low. It worked only in the sense that I felt I was doing something. My face had dried into a brittle shell and I was scrubbing the dead skin off my heel when I became aware of Hunter, standing in the bathroom doorway wearing nothing but faded plaid pajama bottoms.

“Do you know it’s almost four in the morning?”

I nodded, trying to hide the pile of my callused skin.

“Hey, what is this shit you’re reading?” The book. Which I had been carrying around all evening. “Alpha Males are notorious for ambition, energy, drive, and promiscuity. Does your man sound like an Alpha male? Do you want to know how to hold him?” Hunter looked at me, absolutely gleaming with mischief. “I’ll show you how to hold me, darling. You use your right hand. No, seriously, what do you need this crap for? Smart girl like you. By the way, do you know your face is beginning to crack?” He came forward, hitching up the waistband of his pajamas. He stopped an inch away, his chest broader and hairier than it had been in college. I felt as if all this were already part of the past.

I leaned forward into him, and his hands came up to stroke the back of my head. “Is this the end, Hunter?”