Celestial
Eventually, Tamar gathered up her little boy, zipping him into a puffy coat that looked like something an astronaut might wear. Roy and I were both sorry to see her go. It was as though we were her parents, and she our busy, successful daughter who could spare only a few minutes for a visit, but we were grateful for every single second. We stood in the doorway, waving as she looked over her shoulder to ease out of the driveway. As she pulled away, her headlights became two more glowing lights on this block bedazzled for the holidays. My own house was dark; I didn’t even bother to hang the spruce wreath I’d bought a month ago. Old Hickey was festive, though. A string of lights candy-caned up the thick trunk. This was Andre’s work, his effort to assure himself that everything would be all right.
Even after Tamar was long gone, I stared down the quiet street and worried about Andre. He was in Louisiana now, trying to do the noble thing. I’d rung him from the store while he was on the road, making his way south. We’re worth it, I told him. How had so much changed in the span of a couple of hours? Absently, I reached in my pocket for my phone, but Roy swept my hand to the side. “Don’t call him yet. Give me a chance to speak my piece first.”
But he didn’t say anything. Instead, he guided my hands across the break in the bridge of his nose, along the scar at his hairline, small but punctuated twice on each side by pinpoint-raised scars. His face, the totality of it, rested in my palms, solid and familiar. “You remember me?” he asked. “You recognize me?”
I nodded, letting my arms hang at my side as he explored my features. He closed his eyes as though he couldn’t trust them. When his thumb passed my lips, I caught it in a light pucker. Roy responded with a relieved sigh. He led me through the house without turning on the lights, like he wanted to see if he could find his way by touch. A woman doesn’t always have a choice, not in a meaningful way. Sometimes there is a debt that must be paid, a comfort that she is obliged to provide, a safe passage that must be secured. Every one of us has lain down for a reason that was not love. Could I deny Roy, my husband, when he returned home from a battle older than his father and his father’s father? The answer is that I could not. Behind Roy in the narrow hallway, I understood that Andre had known this from the start. This is why he raced down the highway, to keep me from doing this thing that we all feared I would have to do.
How, then, should I classify what transpired between my husband and me the night he returned to me from prison? We were there in the kitchen, me with my back against the granite counter, melted sorbet soaking my clothes.
Roy snaked his hands under my blouse. “You love me. You know you do.”
I wouldn’t have answered even if he hadn’t cut off my breath with a kiss that tasted like desire streaked through with anger. Yes means yes and no means no, but what is the meaning of silence? Roy’s body was stronger now than it was five years ago when he last slept in this house. He was a commanding stranger breathing hot on my neck.
When he moved us in the direction of the master bedroom, the corner room that had originally belonged to my parents and was the space where Roy and I slept as husband and wife, I said, “Not in there.” He ignored me, leading me as though we were dancing. Some things were as unavoidable as the tide.
He removed my clothes as easily as you might peel an orange, then he leaned over to switch on a bright lamp. I was ashamed of my body, five years older than when he last saw me this way. Time can be hard on a woman. I drew knees up to my chest.
“Don’t be shy, Georgia,” Roy said. “You’re perfect.” He gripped my shin, gently tugging my legs straight. Don’t hide from me. Uncross your arms, let me see you.”
In the private library of my spirit, there is a dictionary of words that aren’t. On those pages is a mysterious character that conveys what it is to have no volition even when you do. On the same page it is explained how once or twice in your life you will find yourself bared, underneath the weight of a man, but a most ordinary word will save you.
“Do you have protection?” I asked him.
“What?” he said.
“Protection.”
“Don’t say that, Georgia,” he said. “Please don’t say that.”
He rolled away from me and we lay parallel. I shifted, looking out the window at Old Hickey, ancestral and silent. Even when Roy planted his weighty hand on my hip I didn’t turn. “Be my wife,” he said.
I didn’t answer, so he flipped me over like a log and pushed his face into the hollow of my throat, wedging his hands between my thighs. “Come on, Celestial,” he said. “It’s been so many years.”
“We need protection,” I said, filling my mouth with the word, feeling its weight on my tongue.
He guided my hand below his rib where the skin was knotted and rubbery. “I got stabbed,” he said. “I never did anything to this dude. Never even looked at him, and he sharpens a goddamn toothbrush and tries to kill me with it.”
I let my thumb travel over the scar.
“You see what I’ve been through?” he said. “You didn’t know what was happening to me. I know that if you knew, you wouldn’t have done me like that.”
He kissed my shoulder and up toward my neck. “Please.”
“We have to use protection,” I said.
“Why?” Roy said. “Because I was in prison? I was innocent. You know I was innocent. When that lady got raped, I was with you. So you know I didn’t do it. Don’t treat me like a criminal, Celestial. You’re the only one that knows for sure. Please don’t treat me like I got some kind of disease.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Well, can you at least listen?” He lifted stories from his box of memories, each one making the case for why he shouldn’t be forced to put a barrier between us.
“I accidentally killed a man,” he told me. “I’ve been through a lot, Celestial. Even if you go in innocent, you don’t come out that way. So, please?”
“Don’t beg me,” I said. “Please don’t do that.”
He moved closer, pinning me to the bed.
“No,” I said. “Don’t do this.”
“Please,” he said.
Picture us there in our marriage bed. Me, fixed to the mattress, completely at his grace. But is there any other way, even when love is true and pure, not dirty with time and betrayal? Maybe that’s what it means to be in love, to willingly be at the mercy of another person. I closed my eyes feeling his weight above me, and I prayed like I was supposed to when I was a little girl. If I should die before I wake. “Protection,” I whispered, knowing there was no such thing.
“I’m in pain, Celestial. Can’t you tell?”
And so I lay myself back again, seeing how he had suffered these years, seeing how he suffered then, with his head against the pillow. “I know,” I said to Roy. “I know.”
He turned to me. “Is it because you think I got something, that I did something while I was in there? Or is it because you don’t want to get pregnant again? Because you don’t want to have a baby for me?”
There was no acceptable answer to this question. No man welcomes this way of doing it but not doing it. Coming close but only so close.
“Tell me,” he said. “Which one?”
I flattened my lips, sealing the truths into myself. I shook my head.
He turned, pressing my chest with his own. “You know,” he said, with a trace of menace. “I could take it if I wanted to.”
I didn’t struggle. I didn’t plead. I braced myself for what seemed fated from the moment I entered my own home and felt that it was no longer mine.
“I could,” he said again, yet he raised himself from the bed, wrapping the sheet around himself like a winding cloth, leaving me cold and exposed. “I could, but I won’t.”