by elle`attend
FOR MATURE READERS ONLY
I should have been more surprised, I suppose, when I was served with the divorce papers. But I wasn’t. After all, there weren’t many venues left in this country that would consider a woman’s desertion of her husband and babies for nearly two months without a word as anything other than a breach of her marriage contract.
Brian had actually been very understanding. He packed some things and moved out of the house, leaving it to me until the divorce settlement could be worked out and finalized. Pride, and my somewhat ridiculous sense of amour propre kept me from pleading with him to take me back, and telling him how much I truly loved him, and my babies. I told him instead that I had no intention of contesting the action, and would sign any settlement agreement that he submitted to me. All I asked was that he be generous with the visitation rights to my children. He grew silent at this, and I could tell from his expression and his body language that he had serious misgivings about my having any contact with my babies at all. He plainly thought that I was an unfit mother, unstable, perhaps even mad. I doubted that he would have much trouble convincing a judge of the same thing. I couldn’t even muster the energy to dispute him on this point myself.
I visited my children at my sister-in-law’s, and a good deal of crying was done, on all sides. But my little boy and girl were obviously still hurt and bewildered by my sudden abandonment of them, and again I had great difficulty summoning the emotional energy to overcome their reticence, and my own sense of guilt that I had somehow betrayed them. Sarah, my husband’s sister, was as cold as ice, and made it more than clear that while she couldn’t prevent me seeing my children, she considered my presence in her home an outrage, and a detriment to their emotional well being. She did everything but use the word ‘whore’ in reference to me. After leaving her house, I slumped over the wheel of my car, and sobbed as if my heart would break.
I called Jolie’s parents, but they had not heard from her since she had taken the position with WISDOM. Eileen Bennet didn’t seem overly concerned; after all, her daughter had always been a free-spirited, independent girl, and they had always given her lots of space, and freedom. I was on the verge of voicing my misgivings, of telling her all that I feared and suspected, everything that had happened since her daughter had fallen under Beatrix Mackay’s spell. To her, and to me as well. Some last lonely voice of reason in my head overruled this suicidal impulse, however. The last thing in the world I needed was someone else whispering about ‘poor Van Worth – the woman has gone completely mad, you know.’ I wished her well instead, making her promise to get in touch with me when she heard from Jolie.
If she heard from Jolie…
There were very few nights that I slept through. My dreams were jumbled, chaotic horrors, filled with unspeakable vileness that I could not remember after screaming myself awake. Drenched in perspiration, tears streaming down my face, I would nonetheless assault myself furiously with my hands and fingers until I came, sobbing in disgust, and despair. After, I lay numb and empty on the soaking sheets, fingering myself absently, finding the few ragged little tears in my vulva, where the rings had been. It was all that I had left to convince myself that the last two months had been real, and not simply the fanciful hallucinations of a madwoman.
I found myself wandering downtown one afternoon near the university district. I strolled past the building that housed the offices of WISDOM, Inc., and before I knew it, I was standing outside the frosted double glass doors on the sixth floor, without quite remembering how I had gotten there. The door yielded to my pull, and I entered, feeling like a somnambulist in someone else’s dream.
Cardboard filing boxes were stacked everywhere; the reception lobby was otherwise empty. A young woman sat in a folding chair at a Samsonite table, methodically ticking off entries on a computer printout stretched out on the table. She looked over the top of her reading glasses at me as I entered, a polite smile of inquiry on her lips.
“May I help you?”
“I…I’m not sure. I was looking…I was looking for…for…” I passed a hand over my brow, my head suddenly swimming, my face flushed, and hot. I swayed dangerously, and the young woman rose quickly from her chair, and helped me into it solicitously. She disappeared for a moment, and returned with a paper cup of cool water, which she pressed to my lips. I drank gratefully, my respiration returning to some semblance of normal, and my vertigo of the moment before receding.
“Th…thank you,” I mananged at last.”You’re very kind.”
“Not at all,” the young woman replied, pressing my hand warmly. “If you’re looking for WISDOM, they’re no longer at these offices. They’re closing a lot of their offices in fact, I understand. A consolidation of some sort, I think they are calling it. Ever since Dr Mackay’s accident they’ve been busy rearranging…”
“Accident?” I interrupted, stiffening slightly. “What accident? Is Dr Mackay all right?”
The girl gestured placatingly with her hand. “Quite all right, as far as I know. But she’s had to curtail her schedule for a bit, as I understand it, and is taking the time to do some reorganizing of her business interests.” She paused, smiling helpfully at me, as if inquiring if there were anything else she might assist me with.
“But I’m sorry, I’m interrupting your work here,” I said, beginning to rise from the folding chair.
“Not at all,” she said, taking my arm, and steadying me as I got to my feet. “I’m just waiting for the van to take the last of these things away. And waiting around is so deadly dull, don’t you agree?”
“Then you don’t work for WISDOM?”
“Oh, no. They just hired me through an agency to help finish closing the office, make sure that all the lights are out, and the doors locked and so forth, that sort of thing.”
I stared at her searchingly for a moment. “Then you don’t know how I could get in touch with Doctor Mackay, I don’t suppose.”
“Well, there is a forwarding address for mail and such,” she said, her pretty, unlined face doing its best to form a frown. “I guess I could give you that, if you want to try and get in touch with them…” She bent to the table, and began scribbling on a small memo pad with WISDOM’s logo emblazoned across the top.
“Yes, I’d appreciate that, very much, thanks…” My palms began to sweat lightly, and I felt my lips buzzing, going numb, as if I’d been injected with novocaine. I ran my tongue over them as I watched her finish writing the address on the slip of paper. She tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to me, smiling.
“There you go…”
“Thanks so much…” Our fingers touched briefly. I felt the tingling sensation moving down my neck, spreading over my chest, making my nipples stiffen beneath my blouse. The girl’s smile faded, and her eyes narrowed, homing in on mine with a new intensity, almost a hardness, that had not been evident before.
I heard someone speak, a single word. The word made no sense to me, but the voice sounded so familiar.
It was my voice, I know now.
The girl’s hand moved slowly to my blouse, her fingers brushing the rigid pebble of my nipple tenting the sheer fabric at the tip of my breast. Another word was spoken, by her this time, I think, and my eyelids fluttered tremulously as I felt her fingers glide beneath the hem of my skirt. I began to feel thin, stretched, as if I were fading, or somehow becoming transparent. Her hand slid up and up along my bare thigh, encountering my unencumbered sex. When she touched me in that place, I disappeared altogether.
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I came to myself standing on the sidewalk outside the office tower. My inner thighs were cool, and sticky-feeling where they pressed together beneath my skirt. My face was flushed, and my blouse was soaked in my own perspiration, and transparent where it clung to my breasts, and nipples. I pulled my jacket tightly about myself; it was then I noticed for the first time the damp piece of paper crumpled in my moist palm. I unfolded it, and stared dumbly at the address written on it, the ink already beginning to smear on the soggy scrap of paper.
I shook my head sharply, like a woman awakening from a bad dream. I wadded the note in my fist, and tossed it at the wire trash basket nearby as if it had suddenly been transformed into a poisonous spider in my hand. It sailed in a pure parabola through the air, then settled gently into the receptacle. I fastened the single button on my jacket, ran my fingers shakily through my hair, and began walking unsteadily up the sidewalk toward the taxi standing at the corner.
As I walked, I could not hear my own footsteps on the pavement, though the street was all but deserted.
End
© MEB 2002
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