The logic (radiantly simple, blinding as a sunburst) was that: if one of them died the other would survive and everything would be thrown off balance. But if they both died equilibrium would be reestablished.

15

Monica liked to think without warning, as the cliché would have it, but no doubt she had warning, she had warnings, which she chose to ignore.

His face an immense creased moon, his eyes bright with hatred.

The veins in his forehead standing out.

Furious red worms, those veins; pulsing; giving off heat.

“. . . So why the hell did you come up here, then,” he said, the heel of his hand striking her bare shoulder, his voice incredulous, mocking, meant perhaps to be light, “. . . a big girl like you. A big growed-up girl like you.”

Later he said, crouched over her: “I know you’re judging me, how can I do anything if you’re judging me. . . .”

Monica’s lips were so bruised, so numbed, she couldn’t answer.

She might have apologized but she couldn’t answer.

The ruddy dimpled flesh, the ridges of fat quivering at waist and thighs and belly. Monica had misplaced his name, a nickname; a fond sweet chummy name. And he seemed in the exigencies of his travail to have forgotten hers. He murmured, “Oh honey, Jesus . . . honey . . . you sweet cunt . . . you sweet, sweet . . .”

A bedside clock was ticking loud and fast.

Monica thought: He won’t strangle me, he isn’t the sort.

Monica thought: His name is either Win or Hen, it’s all a code.

She tried not to cry out with the pain but at last she did, it simply wasn’t to be prevented, she was in terror suddenly that her insides had never healed (the abortion, the scooping out, the menstrual periods that had lasted for ten, eleven days) and that she would begin hemorrhaging. He was now grinding his mouth against hers, teeth bared against her teeth, a grin of sorts, he was saying, “Why did you come up here if . . . You bitch. . . .” parting her lips, bruising them. Monica tasted blood but (perhaps) it was only her imagination. So much is imagined, so much is mere hysteria. Hen, Win. Win, Hen. Though the silly drunken golden girl meant only to accommodate and certainly did not resist, her lover was impatient nonetheless, keenly disappointed nonetheless, and bent upon exacting punishment. And there was his tongue, grown immense, poking. His gigantic tongue. And his not-quite-erect penis grinding against her.

The clock ticked, Monica went limp, an old strategy, an old wifely habit. She was thinking of Ariadne’s thread. You took hold of it, you trusted in it, and then it snapped in your fingers. . . . She was thinking of something dreamy and fluid, an element through which one had to thrust oneself, with great effort. The danger of suffocation, of a heart stopping in midbeat. . . .

She was sobbing helplessly, shamelessly. It was all over but she couldn’t stop sobbing.