DAY TWENTY-SIX

The Jag was mine. I’d earned it in the bathroom at R+D a lifetime ago. I’d touched myself when Adam told me to and stopped when his watch beeped. It was the first time I’d heard his Dominant voice outside a boardroom. It was the first time I’d heard him directed it at me and not at an adversary. It was the first time I’d gotten wet from no more than words.

He’d done what he said he would. Signed the car over to me without another word. Though he could have bought himself another car in a heartbeat, he lived in Manhattan. Cars were unnecessary.

Until you wanted to go to Sheepshead Bay, which was a good hour on the B or Q, four stops from the netherlands of Coney Island. Then you’d want a car, and if you were Adam, you’d drive it even though you gave it to your soon-to-be ex-wife when she played with her clit in front of you.

In the underground garage, I handed him the keys when the valet brought the Jag up from the spot we owned. Adam’s coat opened to show his jeans and a cashmere sweater with a button-front shirt underneath. That sweater was winter-sky blue and made the color of his eyes surreal. I could barely look at him as he opened the door for me. I was sure he took that as submissive, but the facts were more mundane and more alarming. The more I looked at him, the more I loved him. I could barely stand it. He’d shaken my body to the core multiple times the night before, then he’d slipped out to the guest bedroom while I slept it off. I woke bereft and irritated that my afternoon had been hijacked.

He snapped the door shut and slid next to me.

“Should I take the Gowanus or the Prospect?” he asked, adjusting the mirrors. He’d picked me up at two o’clock because I needed more time at my desk, and he’d done it without disappointment or complaint.

“I like the Gowanus.”

“Always the rebel.” He put his arm behind the seat and backed up a little, his body stretching gracefully, his neck elongated as he looked through the back window.

“I like seeing how the neighborhood changed.”

He faced front and headed into the daylight. “The warehouses?”

I shrugged. The Gowanus went through a neighborhood of shipyard warehouses that had sat empty for decades as the Port of New York’s business dried up. “Except the ones some greedy developer renovated into condos.”

“I hear he made a killing.”

“You know what I hear?” I said with a hint of gossip in my voice.

Adam took us downtown toward the Battery Tunnel. “What do you hear?”

“I hear his wife can barely sit this morning, he beat her so hard.”

“He’s a real asshole.”

“He’s amazing.” I regretted it before it was out of my mouth. I shouldn’t have been complimenting my husband or getting comfortable with loving him, but I couldn’t help myself. Like water flowing downhill, my feelings went in the direction of gravity’s pull.

“I hear he’s only amazing for the right woman.”

I had to stop it there. Fold my hands in my lap. Pretend that didn’t mean anything at all. He was just talking, right? Just playing the game. I didn’t know how to protect myself from him and win him at the same time.

“Are you ready to get the company back online?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It’s hard without you, and I haven’t been able to hire anyone to replace you with the freeze.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry about—”

“No, please.”

“Well, I am.”

“Fine. Zack is back though,” I said. “So we can get the editorial acquisitions up and running quickly.”

“He wants to fuck you.”

I knew my husband. I knew when he blurted out something he didn’t want to by the way he lowered his voice a notch mid-sentence.

“Yeah, well. I’m married at the moment.”

We entered the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel with its double line of yellow lights and narrow lanes. There was nothing more to say. I’d added “at the moment” to give him an opening to claim me, but the timing was wrong and he wasn’t ready, so we just rode the turns of the tunnel in silence.

The fact that there were other men in the world who were capable of loving me was going to be a sticking point for him. I was poking that flaw as hard as I could, but he knew his weaknesses as well as I did, and he was working on repairing them as hard as I was playing them.

We snapped back into sunlight.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “It’s hard to ask. It’ll be hard to answer. You don’t have to.”

“Noted.”

“Could you ever go back to regular sex? Not sometimes, but all the time. Just vanilla again?”

He stayed left onto the raised platform of the Gowanus. It was pretty empty in midday, and we went on a good clip toward the outer reaches of the Belt Parkway.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I can’t see much outside what’s going on with us right now. But we broke something in Montauk. I don’t know if I can put it back together.”

“What kind of something?”

“Some kind of shell, I guess? I was ashamed. Not like I knew it. I thought I was fine. But I wanted to be hurt and dominated, and I thought if I got all that, I’d hate myself. I thought I’d have to give up who I was. The things that make me, me. I don’t know what they are anymore, but I don’t feel less like myself. I feel more like myself.”

“Do you though?”

“Do I what? Feel like myself?”

“Hate yourself.”

I thought about it. Searched for the answer. I’d said I felt like myself, but I didn’t tell him whether or not I liked it. I’d thought that was implied. “No, I don’t. Not for that.”

He drove without comment. We passed the warehouses. Blocks and blocks of big casement windows and stonework.

“Here’s yours!” I said, pointing at a slate-grey building with white trim.

“You made me do the white.”

We’d been together toward the end of the project, when he was putting on the finishing touches. In the first months of our relationship, he’d brought me there to show off.

“Are you glad?” I asked. “It looks great.”

“Yeah. It does.”

His grandparents’ house was another twenty minutes down the Belt, past the Verrazano Bridge, past Bensonhurst and the train yards at Gravesend, in a nondescript neighborhood built for the working class of the outer boroughs. We turned onto his block as the winter sun got low on the horizon.

The gate across the driveway was locked with a chain. Adam pulled the Jag into a spot across the street and put it in park. He sat there.

Adam’s grandmother had died years before we met, and the estate went into probate immediately. The three-story house was unexceptional on the outside. White siding. Screen door. Green trim. A plaster statue of the Virgin Mary inside an arched white cocoon sat in the center of the front yard. He’d paid for the upkeep through his property management company, painting every few years and making sure the patch of lawn in the front didn’t get overgrown..

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No clue.”

He got out and came around the front of the car. I waited until he opened my door and helped me out. The street was lined with thick-trunked oaks that would shed hundreds of leaves as big as a man’s hand. The curb was crusted with week-old snow and ice Adam insisted on helping me navigate it.

He held my hand as we crossed the street. Ostensibly, the gesture was to keep me from falling. But not really. I knew how to walk on barely icy streets. When he touched me, I knew he needed me. Maybe not in life, but in that moment. He needed me.

He put the code in the front gate, and once we got up the steps, he pulled out a key. “Ready?”

“I’ve never seen where you grew up.”

“It’s nothing special.” He jiggled the lock, and the door opened with a creak and a whoosh.

The hall was dark. A stairway led up. A closet on the left and a door to the right. A coat rack had a single fedora with a little feather in the satin band.

“What’s that smell?” I asked.

“Sulfur. There’s a coal furnace. It stinks up the whole house. My guy came yesterday and started running it. Still works.” He took off his coat and helped me with mine. “My grandfather cut the house up into three units. The stairs go to the upstairs unit, which is two bedrooms, and an attic studio. The rent helped them pay for my school.”

“Real estate speculator runs in the family.”

“Yeah.” He hung up my coat and handed me a handkerchief. “It’s going to be dusty.”

I took it. “Thank you.”

He opened the door on the right, and when I went through, I was transported back in time. Not just to Adam’s childhood, but to another era. An era of wood paneling and molded pile rugs. An era that was dated even when he was a kid. Pictures of him spanned the hall, broken by a doorway to a room with plastic-covered furniture and a console television. He took my hand again, pulling me so fast I couldn’t get a good look at the photos of the handsome boy in the plaid tie with his hands folded in front of him.

Adam went to a larger room with the dining room table. The chairs had mustard velvet cushions covered in more plastic. The fabric matched the drapes.

“They had to really chop this floor up to get it to work,” he said, playing tour guide.

He was concealing some anxiety I couldn’t pinpoint. I hadn’t been around when his grandparents passed. I only knew his grandmother hadn’t lasted more than a month without her husband.

“They built this wall and put their bedroom right off the dining room.” Adam continued with the tour. “The living room, we passed on the way in. My room used to be the porch.” He snapped open the blinds and opened the window.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s get some air in here.”

I did the same to the window next to it. I went left and he went right, opening windows and doors. The dust was its own ecosystem, and the sulfur smell had probably gone right through the plastic covers and permeated every porous mass. I opened the windows in the kitchen, and he went around to the porch. We met in the master bedroom with a king-sized bed in front of huge bay windows. The bedspread was silver blue with diamond stitching, and the pillows were stuffed into a hard tube.

“It’s like a time capsule,” I said.

He snapped his fingers as if remembering. “I had the water turned on.”

I followed him into the kitchen, where he stood watching a faucet run pure brown.

“Yuck.”

“Toxic,” he said. “My grandfather wouldn’t switch to copper pipes. He thought lead made you stronger.”

“Oh my God. What did your grandmother say?”

“She believed what he told her to believe.” He turned away and changed the subject.

He opened the fridge. It stank. A line of brown water came from under it. We looked up. The ceiling was leaking and dripping behind the ancient yellow refrigerator.

We went into action. Adam gripped the appliance by the sides and scooted it one way, then the other to pull it out. I went looking for a pot. Couldn’t find one.

“I think something died back here in 1987,” Adam said.

I listened as I looked for something to catch the leak.

“Or when Grams died, latest,” he said.

Some cabinets were totally empty, and some had odd things in odd places. I opened a cabinet to the left of the sink. On the bottom shelf were wine glasses, above them were dishes, and on the top shelf was a big blue bowl.

Adam continued. “She couldn’t do a thing without him. He died, and everything went to shit. This leak could have been here and she wouldn’t have gotten it fixed. Not without him.”

The blue bowl would do.

“The bills.” His voice came from behind the fridge with a particular muffled echo. “The tenants. How she cooked. What she cleaned on what days. I don’t know how she made it fifteen minutes without him telling her how to breathe.”

I slid a kitchen chair across the linoleum and situated it in front of the counter so I could reach the bowl. I stretched and reached it with both hands as Adam told me more about the dynamics of the people who had raised him.

“I bet she died because he told her to cook him dinner from the grave.”

I balanced the ridge of the bowl on the tips of my fingers and lowered myself.

“Stop!”

I froze with my knee on the counter. Adam was half in-half out of the back of the fridge. He held a tea towel in his right hand that was loaded with brown behind-the-refrigerator gunk, and his left was held out to me like a flashing sign at the end of a crosswalk.

“What?” I got my other knee on the counter. “It’s for the leak.”

I held out the bowl, but he wouldn’t take it.

“Not that bowl.”

“All right.”

He opened the oven. The pots were in there. Obviously.

He took a sauce pot and wedged it behind the fridge to catch the brown drops.

“Adam?”

“This is what I’m talking about. This is exactly what I’m talking about.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just get down. Just…” He held out his hands, one empty, one clutching a gunky tea towel. “Fuck. Where would a normal person put the garbage?”

“Under the sink.” I got down so I could reach it, but Adam yanked open another cabinet where an old plastic garbage container was upside down on the shelving paper.

He slapped the tea towel in it. “Nothing ever made sense.”

“People get set in their ways.” I sat on the counter with my feet on the seat of the chair and put the bowl in my lap.

“You see that bowl?”

He was upset. I didn’t know why, but something about that kitchen had set him off.

“This one?”

“We used that every day. And every day she had to have my grandfather get it. Did she ever say, ‘Let’s put it on a lower shelf instead of the wine glasses? Because, you know, we drink our fucking wine out of fucking jelly glasses?’ No. Because he wanted it that way and what he wanted he got.”

When I was a kid, I used to stand under the light switch and flick it as slowly as I could to see if I could discern the moment the light went from off to on. I never caught the moment. It was too fast. But that moment was happening in the kitchen where Adam grew up.

“And you know why?” he continued, even as the idea solidified in my head. “I figured this out when he died and she didn’t know how to do shit. He did that and a billion other things so he’d be indispensable.”

“He needed to be needed,” I said.

“He didn’t want her to function without him.”

“He needed to dominate her.”

“What?”

“Not sexually. Or maybe. I don’t know. But he needed her to submit, and she did.”

He cocked his head a little, and I jumped off the counter. I handed him the bowl.

“And when he died,” I said, “she had to go too. Right?”

He took the bowl gently, as if he didn’t want to break my thought. I didn’t let go. “What are you trying to say?”

“You always said she died to make him happy. I never knew what you meant. But now I do.” I let the bowl go. “I’m not going to die without you. I’m never going to be so dependent on you or anyone.”

“I never said it was like that for subs. You’re confused.”

He didn’t use his Dominant voice to object. He said the words without conviction, as if he wanted me to prove otherwise.

“Intellectually, you know that’s the truth. But you can’t unsee what you saw with your family. In your heart, Adam? In your heart you can’t love a sub because you’re afraid they’ll forget how to live.”

“That makes no sense.”

“That doesn’t make it false.” I put my hands on his arms. I needed to touch him. I needed to feel him connected to me, because I knew I was right. “Your problem isn’t that you don’t love. Your problem is you love so much it scares you.”

He pulled away, and when I went to grasp his hand, he snapped it away. “This is ridiculous.”

“What’s—?”

“Everything. All of it. Just…” He curled his fingers into fists and closed his eyes. “Just give me a minute.”

He left and didn’t look back. Through the dining room and down the hall, past his childhood and the plastic-covered furniture in the living room, onto the front porch, where he’d slept as a boy.