Authors: Jacqueline Briskin
On the Fairmont’s large, bridal suite bed her torment began. He did not kiss her or caress her breasts. Instead, untying his pajama strings, he rolled on top of her, plunging into the dryness. Encountering the indisputable proof of her virginity, he battered his entry. She screamed. The pain was crueler than when, aged ten, she had fallen from her cantering mare, rolling over and breaking both an ankle and a wrist.
“Gideon, you’re hurting me,” she cried.
The heavy, demonic weight never shifted, the machine of masculinity continued to pound her into the firm mattress. The sound of his pelvis thumping against hers coordinated with the creaking of the bed in much the same way that her whimpering groans joined with the wail of sirens in Chinatown, which this room overlooked. She was hurtfully wet down there now, and drenched with his sweat, a thick odor, like malt vinegar.
After what seemed an hour but was probably no longer than fifteen minutes, he gave a shout, thrust violently, shouted again, and collapsed gasping on top of her.
She saw that the bed was copiously drenched with blood. When she rose to go the bathroom, her torn thigh muscles protested. She staggered.
“My poor little Crystal,” he said, lifting her effortlessly. He set her down on the towel-covered stool, soaking a washcloth to rinse her thighs, his big hands gentle. He filled a glass and gave her two aspirin. “Here, dear.”
Yet the minute they returned to bed, he once more climbed atop her, spearing her under his incessant assault, which lasted yet longer this time.
* * *
During the five-day cruise, the
Lurline
’s passengers saw a middle-aged, dotingly uxorious bridegroom running to get his exquisite bride her midmorning boullion and afternoon tea, buying out the best items in the gift shop to indulge her; crew and passengers alike caught their breath at the new young wife’s hauntingly lovely smiles of gratitude. They were witnessing the bright, daytime side of the Talbott marriage.
Behind the locked stateroom door, and later in their suite at the Royal Hawaiian on Waikiki Beach, the baleful intercourse continued. They never discussed their nights. Neither had the words to explain the endlessly, malevolently copulating goat and the fragile, molested girl who lay unmoving under him.
Crystal, though not given to fruitless introspection,
sometimes would find herself brooding about “it.” Had Gideon during those years of righteous fidelity inflicted his male violence on Aunt Matilda; was this why the poor lady had retreated into illness? Or was this sweaty warfare between the sheets a vast, ugly communal secret shared by all wives?
The most unfathomable part of the Talbott’s marriage was that outside of the bedroom, Gideon was unfailingly generous, considerate, worshipful, adoring, and on Crystal’s part she felt both respect and affection for him.
By the time they returned to the mainland, she had suffered an irreversible loss. She felt nothing but a revulsed loathing for sex.
At four on the afternoon of January 2, Honora emerged from the tall office building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. She didn’t feel the ninety-degree heat or smell the exhaust from the traffic; she barely saw the pedestrians.
A baby.
The thought coursed through her like electricity through a light filament.
A baby.
She looked up at the aluminum Christmas tree that still topped the lamppost, and suddenly clasped the warm, grooved steel, whirling around: this being Hollywood, magnet for pretty girls and nuts, the passersby glanced at her with absentminded indulgence.
She still couldn’t believe it.
“You’re at the end of your first trimester,” Dr. Capwell had said with the bombast common to medical men precarious in their professional skill.
Honora had stared across his cluttered desk disbelievingly. Her periods hadn’t stopped. Last week Curt, worried about her lassitude and excessive need for sleep, had insisted she see a doctor. The apartment house manageress had recommended Dr. Capwell, who had sent blood and urine samples to the lab.
“But what about my periods?” she had mumbled, flushing.
His long, flabby cheeks had wobbled. “My dear young woman, spotting is quite common when the menses would occur.” Opening and closing his drawers, he came up with a dog-eared pamphlet. A female profile, yellow lines ballooning from breasts and stomach, showed various stages of pregnancy. “This will answer any of your prepartum questions. And here is my fee schedule.”
She released the lamppost and started west on Hollywood Boulevard. At Van Vliet’s supermarket she bought an inexpensive cellophane bag of salad vegetables, four oranges with withered skin that would be good for juice, a quarter pound of sliced ham, a quart of milk. She stared into the bakery showcase for several minutes then splurged on a chocolate cream pie. Today’s news called for a celebration.
As she replaced her wallet in her purse, she saw the pamphlet, and suddenly thought of Dr. Capwell’s three-hundred-dollar fee. She had no idea of what was charged for prenatal visits and delivery, but it seemed very high—or was this in contrast with the Ivorys’ bank balance, which was very low?
At Talbott’s Curt had earned a top salary: secure in his abilities, insecure about his early privations, he had saved very little. A week after their arrival, he had received a cashier’s check for two hundred dollars from the subleasor for his gorgeous decorator furnishings.
His Los Angeles contacts had taken him to
lunch. Over martinis and porterhouses he heard the same story: private and government contracts had dried up, engineers were not being taken on but laid off by the hundreds.
Secretly Honora brooded that his inability to connect was part of a punitive conspiracy. In her scenario Gideon had discovered her letter to Joscelyn and blacklisted him.
Curt took his professional rejections with an outward jauntiness. He mailed résumés to every engineering company in the area. On the days that he had no interviews, they explored Los Angeles or went to the beach or played tennis on the cracking courts at De Longpre Park. At the beginning of December he had traded in his yellow Buick on a square, ugly prewar Ford coupe plus three hundred dollars. He made no secret of his preference for sharp convertibles, top restaurants, private clubs. Honora, dazed with love, considered southern California heaven. The one cloud was being separated from her family—she often woke from dreams of them with tears on her cheeks. About Curt’s future she was incurably optimistic. Two weeks ago, when a builder had offered him a job carving an Encino lemon grove into tract-size lots, she had urged him to refuse. “When something good comes along, you’ll be tied up.”
This morning he had driven off to yet another appointment.
She turned at the corner of Cherokee, halting to rearrange the awkward bakery box in the heavy brown grocery bag before starting up the
street’s incline.
The Ivorys lived in a one-story stucco. Quite a few of the red roof tiles were missing, and a thick blanket of bougainvillea hid the peeling paint. The long, dingy hallway was cool and smelled of an unknown spice.
At her door, she called, “Curt?”
He opened the door. “What’re you selling today, lady?”
“This,” she said, leaning forward to kiss his mouth.
Pulling away, he took the grocery bag, asking, “Anything spoilable?”
“Milk and a pie.”
“You put them away. I’ll let down the bed.”
* * *
Late afternoon saffron light sifted through the closed venetian blinds to cast a quadrangle across their entwined, naked bodies. They were smiling at each other.
“Now we can talk,” she said. “What happened at your meeting?”
“Nothing much. I have a job.”
She clutched his bicep. “Curt!”
“That surprise shows a definite lack of wifely confidence.”
“You really got the job?”
“Not at the appointment.” His tone was casual, but his excitement gave off vibrations against her skin.
“Will you stop being so irritating and mysterious?”
“This morning I got a letter from Fuad Abdulrahman—”
“Fuad?” She could feel the postcoital warmth drain from her. “Then it’s in Lalarhein?”
“Yes. He’s offered me the job of project manager on this road they’re building.”
How could she go to a backwater Arabian country? Now?
Stop being idiotic
, she told herself.
Women have babies there.
Her expression must have flickered. His topaz eyes were suddenly watchful. She looked down. Her breasts were definitely larger, the nipples no longer pink but light toast. She covered herself with the sheet.
“Now what about you?” he said. “What did the doctor say?”
If I tell him
, she thought,
he’ll turn Fuad down.
Those periods were pure serendipity—like her, Curt had never once considered pregnancy.
Time enough to let him know once we’re in Lalarhein.
Honora took a deep breath. “It turns out,” she said, “that I’m as healthy as they come.”
“Then why’ve you been sleeping twenty-three hours a day?”
“The laziness of a well-loved woman,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Honora?”
“Also a slight iron deficiency,” she covered hastily. Dr. Capwell had prescribed something called Feosal pills.
“That’s all,
iron
deficiency?”
“Nothing like a little anemia to drag a girl down.” Finding wifely duplicity more than she could handle, she changed the subject. “When do we leave?”
He took her hand, playing with the narrow, electroplated gold band. “The road’s going to cut from Daralam, that’s the capital, to the Persian Gulf, an area generously described as primitive.”
“I’ll stay in my tent, then, pistol at hand.”
“We’re talking about heat, flies, sandstorms, lack of water, not cannibals,” he said, pausing before he finished. “Sweet, Fuad says one of the conditions for the chief engineer is that he can’t bring his family.”
The light was gone and gray shadows filled the room.
“How long will you be gone?” she asked, attempting to keep her voice steady.
“They want me to leave right away—Lalarhein’s not exactly on the flight path, it takes close to a week to get there. I’ll be on the project until March, or at the longest, the beginning of April. They’ve offered an exorbitant salary with two months up front. I’ll deposit it in the account for you.”
At the mention of cold cash her throat clogged with childish tears. How could she live without him?
If she told him the truth he would never leave her.
Without his work he’s dying. The baby’s not due until the beginning of June, and he’ll be back long before then.
Choking back the tears, she said. “There’s just one thing.”
Again he was alert. “What’s that?”
“No lolling under the date palms with any of Fuad’s concubines.”
His laughter held a note of relief. “Only on
my days off.” He caught her hand, pressing the wrist to his lips, his breath warming her pulse.
* * *
On January 4 she saw him off at the Burbank Airport, the first leg of his journey. She waited on the observation deck ten minutes after the speck that was his plane had disappeared into the cloudless blue of the eastern sky. As she left the parking lot she turned left not right, and didn’t notice the frame shacks and citrus groves had given way to uncultivated land, dwarfed shrubbery, then dun-colored foothills. The only movement was a fringe-winged hawk circling above the tumble of rocks. She was hopelessly lost. Speeding up curves, she reached a gas station with old-fashioned pumps. Breathlessly she explained to the sun-dried, grizzly attendant that she was trying to get to Hollywood. “Girlie,” he said. “you’re heading dead in the wrong direction.”
Intimidated by the way Dr. Capwell wrote in his cramped hand across three by five cards during her visit as well as by his convoluted medical jargon, Honora seldom questioned him. Instead, she settled into the regimen outlined in the pamphlet. Every morning she walked two miles, she drank her daily quart of milk, ate bland food, showered rather than taking a
long, relaxing bath. She felt incredibly carnal, and maybe in a way it was just as well that Curt wasn’t around since the pamphlet stated:
sexual intercourse should be restricted as much as possible.
Fresh air being a must, she spent a lot of time in the apartment building’s narrow, mossy backyard where hummingbirds hovered at citrus blossoms and tangled vines. Here, she wrote voluminously to Curt. She did not tell him about the baby. Her secrecy lay behind an amorphous cloud of reasons. There was no point worrying him when he was so far away. She eagerly, gleefully, anticipated his expression of incredulous delight when he saw her condition—hadn’t he informed her they would have a minimum of three children?
Lalarheini mail service was rotten. From Curt’s comments she knew he had never received certain of her fat letters, and assuredly some of his were missing. A clump of finger-smeared, multistamped envelopes would arrive in one day’s delivery, then she would wait for weeks on tenterhooks dreaming up disasters that had stopped him from writing.
She and Langley exchanged frequent letters, but her fingers cramped whenever she tried to mention her condition.
In her cumulative loneliness she often wept. These were the easy tears of pregnancy, but Honora didn’t realize it.
Her breasts were tender and growing large—nearly as big as Crystal’s she would think proudly—but her abdomen bulged very slightly and her loose sweaters hid the straining zippers.
At the end of January she felt a peculiar liquid thrusting. Though maternity clothes were not yet a must-have, she bought two smocks and a brown rayon-garbardine skirt with a cutout stomach.
* * *
One nippy evening in mid-February she was lounging on the couch listening to the Gas Company’s Evening Concert while eating a green pippin and reading
The House of Mirth.
At a tentative rap on the door, she looked up bewildered. Dropping the apple core in a saucer, holding her place open in the library book, she went to answer.