Page 53 of Trade
“The decision was made jointly.”
A chuckle slips out of my mouth, high-pitched and raw. No one loves the passive voice like a head of department.It was decided. The decision was made jointly. Decisions make themselves, don’t you know. No one can be held responsible.
“I don’t want to be here,” I tell him. I don’t figure it matters, but I want to be sure he knows.
“Well, she’s all yours now, sir,” the orderly says, taking that as his cue to leave. He casually slaps the doorframe on his way out.
Bennett shoves his hands in his pockets. He can’t stand the sight of my injuries. His eyes catch on my black eye or the suture on my lip and drop immediately to the floor as a flush crawls up his pasty neck.
“Gloria—” he begins and then drifts into silence.
I don’t care what he’s come up with to say. I know this man better than anyone else alive. There is no doubt in my mind he has long since convinced himself everything he did was completely justified. Last night or this morning, whenever he knew this moment would happen, he began to rehearse his explanations in the mirror as he brushed his teeth and shaved, and probably while he laced his boots and boiled water for coffee, too.
I’ve heard him do it a hundred times, muttering through an argument he was going to make later to Neil or the Assembly, workshopping the perfect words, the perfect tone.
I don’t want to hear whatever he’s come up with to excuse himself.
“Save it,” I tell him and wander to the nook we jokingly called our primary suite. She slept there with him.
Linens are laundered monthly. I bet at least one of her long hairs is stuck to the sheet.
I conjure up the idea and force myself to stare it in the face without blinking, like the doctor pricked at my skin to test the numbing agent before he stitched up my lip, and my heart gives a little flip-flap as I realize I don’t care. Not even a little. Not at all.
She was sleeping in my bed. I was sleeping under the stars.
I take the clothes and sundries stacked on the right half of the shelves—Bennett’s side—and toss them on the bed.
“Gloria?” Bennett’s voice takes on a stern tone. A month ago, it would’ve caused a worm of worry to squirm in my belly. A month ago, if I had heard that note of warning, I’d have made a joke, played innocent, or dropped it and lived to fight another day.
At least that’s what I told myself. I never got around to the fighting, though, did I? Dalton fought. I gave up. Gave in. Left him. A cowardly sheep until the end. No, not a sheep. A mole. Blind. Burrowed deep in the hole I dug for myself. The well-behaved woman. Upstanding citizen. Outwardly compliant. Inwardly scared to death.
I ignore Bennett and drag the shelves back to their place in the living area, ignoring the stabbing pain in my side.
“Should you be doing that?” he asks, but he doesn’t budge from his place by the sofa.
I take Dad’s books and put them back on the shelf where they belong, the way he organized them by the Dewey Decimal System—botany and then agriculture, pest control, field and specialty crops, so on and so forth. When I’m finished, I stand back and look at my work, expecting—hoping—to feel something, but there’s nothing inside me but impotent rage and a roaring grief I can’t listen to for even a second, or I’ll be deafened.
“You’re such a sad excuse for a man,” I say, not even turning to look at Bennett. “All those years, tearing myself up, wondering why Dad picked you instead of me.”
I glance at him over my shoulder. His face is flaming red. Oh, he’s furious, but he would never dare hit me. He’s still convinced that he’s civilized, even though he sent me to be raped, and from all appearances, there’s no conflict over that in his mind.
I want to scream the truth at him. This place isn’t real. It’s a mass delusion.
Or does he already know?
How much of a villain is he?
I want to yell at him that I saw a lake that stretched farther than the eye can see.
I saw Acer saccharum and Fagus grandifolia and Platanus occidentalis in living color, and a hundred other plants and animals he’s only ever read about in books. I touched their leaves and bark, climbed their branches, laid in their shade and made love underneath their canopies to a man who is so much stronger and braver andbetterthan him that it doesn’t seem that they can be from the sameplanet, let alone the same genus and species.
I want to tell my petulant, pasty husband I made a fire and swam in a lake and felt sunshine on my bare skin, but since that’s forbidden, I say, “You know what I figured out when I was Outside? Dad knew you’d make a better head of department because he knew you’d be better than I could ever be at begging and wheedling and licking boots for a smaller and smaller cut of the pie until you had no choice but to realize you are small and weak and inconsequential, and the only way to make yourself feel big would be to fuck an eighteen-year-old. Did it work? Were you able to convince yourself you weren’t an impotent desk jockey whose greatest accomplishments in life are pushing paper and kissing Neil Jackson’s ass?”
“Big talk for a woman whose face looks like that,” he snaps back, his face immediately blanching when he realizes he let his good-guy mask slip.
I grin at him, even though it pulls at the suture and hurts like a son of a bitch. “I’m not allowed to tell you anything about the Outside, but I’ll tell you this”—I lower my voice—“it was worth it. Everysecond. And I don’t regret it at all.” I glance around our airless, dim quarters and raise an eyebrow. “Can you say the same?”
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