Femme Fatale and other stories. Laura Lippman
give up books and CDs and coats with velvet collars, but those economies of scale would make no difference. Like everyone else we knew, we were addicts. We were hooked on our income. He was hooked on my income. My servitude made his freedom possible. I wanted to be a freelancer, too, to leave the world of bosses and benefits. One day, he promised, one day. And then we bought the house.
I couldn’t talk about this, for some reason. Pressed for the concrete reasons of my discontent, I couldn’t say anything, except to complain about the train, the drag of commuting. We had only one car, so I took the local train to work, which jounced and jolted, making five stops in eleven miles. It was wonderful in the morning, the paper in my lap, a travel mug of my own coffee in hand. But the last train on this line left the city at 7:30. At day’s end, I always felt as if I was on the run, a white-collar criminal returning to my halfway house. I talked about the train until three or four in the morning, until my eyes dropped with sleep, his with boredom and bourbon.
When I came home the next day, there was a new Volvo waiting for me in the driveway. Green, with a beige leather interior and a CD player.
“Now you don’t have to take the train anymore,” he said.
The car was just the beginning, of course. We responded to our marital crisis in the acceptable modern way: we threw fistfuls of money at various people in what is known as the mental health profession. I found them in my magazine’s “Best Doctors” issue. His psychiatrist. My psychiatrist. A licensed clinical social worker who specialized in couples therapy and who believed in astrology and suggested bowling as a way to release aggression. A specialist in social anxiety disorders, who prescribed various tranquilizers for my husband. Another licensed social worker, whose beliefs seemed more sound, but whose work yielded no better results. He gave us homework, we did it dutifully, but neither one of us could see how it was helping. I wanted to talk about the suicide threat, which I considered vile. My husband disavowed it, downplayed it. He wanted to talk about my secret plan to “stabilize” him so I could leave with a clear conscience. The social worker said we both had to give up our insistence on these topics and move on.
“Are you scared?” my shrink asked me in February.
“Very,” I said. He told me to search the house for a gun the next time I was left alone, but I was almost never left alone. Finally my husband went to the grocery store, but I didn’t find a gun. I was almost disappointed. I wanted hard evidence of the fear I felt, I wanted to be rational. I did discover that my husband was stockpiling the tranquilizers from his doctor. He had claimed to have trouble sleeping since I admitted I thought about leaving. Why? I wanted to ask. Are you watching me all night? Do you think I’d slip out then? How little he knew me if he thought I’d leave that way. I imagined him killing me as I slept, then killing himself. I began to have trouble sleeping, too, and it was my turn to get a prescription, my turn to stockpile.
But how would he do it, my skeptical sister asked. “He can barely summon up the energy to change a lightbulb, he’s not organized enough to buy a gun. I hate to say it, but he would be lost without you.”
Her words hung there, making us both glum.
“I’m not saying you should stay,” she added. “Only that you shouldn’t be scared of him.”
“But you’re saying what he said, more or less. If I leave, I have to be prepared to face the consequences.”
“Are you?”
“Almost.”
I had no reason to stay, but I had no reason to leave. Until, it seemed to me, he said what he said, revealed how far he would go to keep me. I believed in my marriage vows, if not in the God to which I had made them. My husband didn’t hit me, he didn’t cheat on me. I knew no other reason to leave a spouse. Oh, yes, he was lazy, and he liked to tie one on now and then, upending the bourbon bottle in his mouth to celebrate this or that. Or, more frequently now, to brood. But I couldn’t fault him for that. I couldn’t really fault him for anything, except for the fact that he was willing to ignore my misery as long as I stayed. He was prepared to make that deal, to do whatever he could to keep me there.
I thought there were rules for leaving, a protocol. I thought there would be a good time or a right time. I realized there would never be a good time.
“What can you get out of the house without him being suspicious?” my shrink asked me in early March.
“Myself,” I said. “Maybe a laptop.”
“You can’t take a few things out, over several days?”
“No,” I said. “He’d notice.” And it was only when I said it that I realized it was true: he was keeping an inventory. He was going through my closet while I was at work, checking my underwear drawer, looking under my side of the bed. He was spying on me as surely as I had spied on him when I went looking for the gun he never bought. All those things—the CDs, the books, the shoes, the clothes, the Volvo—were meant to weigh me down, to keep me in place. That’s why he had allowed me to have them. He was piling bricks, one by one, in front of the exit, burying me alive.
“Then it will have to be just you and your toothbrush,” my shrink said. “Call from your sister’s house after work and tell him you’re not coming back.”
I came home from that session planning to do just that. But my husband knew me too well. He could see it in my face, in my eyes. He backed me into a corner in our bedroom that night, demanding to know why I was unhappy, how I could turn on him. Forever and ever, I had said, I who valued words and vows above all else. How could I think of leaving? He did not touch me. He didn’t have to touch me to scare me. He demanded every secret, every fear, every moment of doubt I had ever experienced—about us, about myself. I sat in the corner, knees to my chest, shaking with sobs. I began to think I would have to make up confessions to satsify him, that I would have to pretend to sins and lapses I had never experienced. He stood above me, yelling. Somewhere in the house, our dog whimpered. I would have to leave him, too. Leave our dog, leave the car, leave the clothes, leave the CDs and books, lose the opera, and La Bohème was next. Of course, it would have to be La Bohème. It was always La Bohème. The fact is, I’d even have to lose my toothbrush. He was watching me that closely now. I’d be lucky to get out of the house with my own skin.
I did the only thing I knew to do: I capitulated. I asked for his forgiveness. I brought him the bourbon bottle and he poured me a glass of my favorite wine, a Chardonnay he usually mocked for its lack of subtlety. We drank silently, pretending a truce. We crawled into bed and watched one of his favorite DVDs, a Sergio Leone Western. I would start to doze off, then pretend to be wide awake when he asked if I was sleeping. He didn’t like me to fall asleep with the television on. He resented the ease with which I slipped into sleep each night.
On our television, a boy stood beneath his brother, who had a noose around his neck. If the boy moved, his brother would die. Henry Fonda stuck a harmonica in his mouth. “Play,” he said, “play for your ever-lovin’ brother.” Of course he couldn’t stand there forever, harmonica in mouth, hands tied behind his back. He staggered forward, and his brother died.
By the time the sun came up, I realized an unpredicted snow had been falling all night, and the streets were near impassable, even for a brand-new Volvo.
But I had to go to work or be docked a day’s pay, snow or no snow, binge or no binge, Sergio Leone or no Sergio Leone. I said good-bye to my husband’s slumbering form and headed out the door. I wore jeans, snow boots, a black turtleneck, the new winter coat, suede gloves, and a felt hat. I turned the key in the lock. I wanted to take it from my ring and throw it in the nearest drift, but I knew I couldn’t. I’d have to come back. I walked to the train. I did my work. And that night, when the train stopped at our station, I wasn’t on it. I was at my sister’s house. She wasn’t approving, but she was sympathetic. She listened as I called and told him, in a choked voice, that I was never coming back. He didn’t say anything. The line went dead in my hand.
He didn’t have a gun, after all, so there was no blood on the walls. But there was all that booze, and all those pills, his and mine, squirreled away for the sleeplessness