She spent the ages of 12 to 18 in a rapid succession of overwrought love affairs, often with boys she had scarcely touched before she broke up with them, and spent her summers writing long, stream-of-consciousness letters to them. She had learned that term Stream of Consciousness from English class during her sophomore year high school and had recognized it immediately as her natural method of communication. A stream—rushing and pushing and beautiful and flowing over the rocks and keys and pennies below it and singular, not a conversation of water but a soliliquy.
She avoided the telephone. In letters, she could cross things out, destroy whole pages and start again, make a voice that she liked and wished she could be all of the time. She could construct long paragraphs with strings of phrases that would exhaust the recipient into the recognition that she was something more than he had imagined and worthy of any love he could give her and probably more.
She could be insistent in letters in a way that the telephone or face-to-face conversations didn’t allow. It was just her, writing and writing and revising and re-writing until the letter was perfect and her thoughts could arrive in something with the heft they deserved, something that required three stamps and a stapler to hold the envelope together.
Few of the boys shared her love of writing. Most of them called her after they received the letters, bewildered, and asked what they meant.
Are you mad? They’d say, their voices betraying that they didn’t understand what she had written or why and were only afraid that they had done something wrong and wouldn’t get to put their hands under her shirt up in the bleachers just below the long row of broken flourescent lights during the basketball game.
But a few would respond in writing, and as she grew older, graduated from high school, and began doomed long-distance relationships during college, she had narrowed down the men who would play and the men who wouldn’t.
She developed a telent of sensing what was in each letter before she had opened it. On days when the letters bore bad news, or no news, or were terse and full of gaps, her stomach would seize up as she touched the lid or slid the key into the box. Later—before she met him, the man she would eventually marry who wrote letters as beautiful as the ones she sent, letters so beautiful she liked them better than her own—she began began to believe that her body would tell her when something was not right.
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Years after, she tried to play the scene back and catch any twinge of knowing. But she’d known nothing; her body had failed her.
She walked through the apartment door and went up the nondescript stairway, the lights dim against the dark, the walls empty and freshly painted in a dull hue that looked like the yellow of age that creeps up on white without the added charm of actual age.
She put the key in the door. He shouldn’t have been home and she shouldn’t have been home. It was summer, the first real hot day, a day that always caught her by surprise—she’d worn a long-sleeved shirt and stockings and by three she felt heavy and sick of the feeling of her flesh against the fabric. She finished early and slipped out without asking her boss.
He must have come home early, too. Later, he insisted that this had been the only time, but she wasn’t sure and it didn’t really matter. The scene had a feeling of ritual.
She heard sounds from the hallway and did not think much of them: he must be home watching television. It sounded muffled and she imagined he was bored, maybe asleep in front of one of those terrible shows that reconstructed crimes in detail.
Her first thought was this is a performance. The woman on the floor had her hands tied behind her back with slippery black ropes, ropes they had bought together from a novelty store but had scarcely used. He always laughed when he brought them out, attempting to tie her wrists to the bedpost and usually giving up when the knots fell apart the moment she put any pressure against them.
The woman looked up and she first thought her mouth had been cut into a wider smile like the Joker in Batman movies, but it was just a red scarve tied around her mouth as a gag and knotted tight behind her head. The fabric pressed tightly against the woman’s mouth and she could not speak. The woman looked up with difficulty—her left cheek was pressed against the ground, though she was on her knees. Her breasts hung down and moved with her head. Her legs were spread wide and she lay on the wooden floor, her eye makeup running in the heat. The skin around her knees was red and her whole body seemed to quiver with the effort of staying upright.
How long had the woman been there? Her first instinct was to untie the woman and help her up—it must be painful, kneeling like that, facedown, arms pulled behind your back.
He came in as soon as she met the woman’s eye and her mind understood completely what she was seeing. He was naked, red-blotched, and the sight of him almost made her laugh—his bobbing penis eager and almost innocent until he saw her and stopped, all color and buoyancy drained away.
Later, it wasn’t so much infidelity that hurt her but the tableau of it—the woman bent face-down, legs spread, tied up in expert knots that would not slip (he had known how to make them all this time), her mouth that had first seemed like a cut. The woman in the middle of the room, gagged and silent and still what he had come for.
