The Barter Read online

“Because I was sick?” John shrugged, squinted away toward the window, where the night was blueing outside and the shishing sound of trees came from past the kitchen garden. Even in the dimness she saw him deciding to lie. “I’ve got some good help. The Heinrichs—Paul and Martin. We’ve been working out here all spring, and I’ve never felt better in my life.” He turned to her then, seeming to unleash the whole force of himself on her in a moment, his determination, hope, desire, fear, that brightness—it was too much for Rebecca, who almost leaped out of her kitchen chair in her instinct to escape. Yet at the same time panic kept her rooted to her seat just as if she’d grown out of it.

  “And I’ve never been happier in my life than I am tonight, Beck,” he said to her, either tactfully ignoring or not seeing the reaction his loving, unhurried words were having on his wife. The panic sent stupid thoughts skittering like a handful of spilled dry beans across Rebecca’s consciousness. I won’t be swallowed! Close your mouth! “You know—you must know—I’ve always loved you.”

  “Oh God,” Rebecca moaned. She put her hands over her face.

  She felt, rather than heard, John’s hesitation. Then he stood and moved toward her, putting his hand on her hair.

  “Don’t be afraid, Beck.”

  Misery and embarrassment kept her still.

  “I’m sorry, John,” she said through her fingers.

  “It’s all right,” he said gently, although she knew from his tone that he couldn’t have understood her.

  “I’m not . . . strange.” She kept her fingers over her eyes, breathing into her palms. She stammered—how unlike her, she thought, who is speaking, who is saying these things. “I’m not a monster.” I’m not special. I’m not anything. I’m not a nurse or an actress or a saint or a teacher. I would still like the right to decide what makes me happy. “I think I’m afraid of what we just did, today—getting married, I mean. I’m afraid of being unhappy. But I believe in you, I believe in you.”

  John touched her hair again. “If you do, then everything will be all right.” His voice was troubled—instantly, she had to work not to hate him a little bit. Oh, he was a good person, one of the best. And she . . . What could be wrong with her, to say these things without thinking of what they meant or whether she even meant to say them? She was wild and stupid and afraid, an animal, not a reasonable adult. She felt a deep disgust in herself and an equally bottomless pity for her husband. How could she rescue them in this terrible, idiotic hour?

  “I do,” she promised. She reached for bravery. “I do love you. Let me—let me show you.” She stood and took his hand, which closed tightly around hers.

  The kitchen was black now and very quiet. John gently pulled her into his arms, and she could hear the raggedness of his breath in the instant before their mouths touched again, for only the third time since they’d known each other. Her lips opened under his; she felt everything that was herself opening, a slow, reaching movement like that of water that has been spilled over hard-packed earth, seeking its widest circumference before penetrating into the ground. There was that sound again, that broken sound from the battered cavern of his chest, where his sadly strained heart lived. Her John’s heart. She must be careful with it. She flattened her hands against his chest. She would be brave. She moved her hands down to his belt. His body stiffened. Knowing how she affected him gave her power, and she longed to use it. The plane of her hand dropped down over the meridian of his belt buckle; she was no longer thinking now; there was no need for thought. Or was it rather that she was thinking harder, calculating faster, than she ever had in her life?

  John broke away first. His breath was so uneven that Rebecca wondered briefly whether this was something he was strong enough for. Maybe I should stop. I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to begin. In the darkness his expression just registered—either startled or angry or hungry. It didn’t matter. His mouth was on hers again, and he had pulled her against him.

  And now a peculiar thing began to happen: As her actions grew bolder, her mind wandered further and further away. Why this should happen, she didn’t know, couldn’t say. As she sensed that John had lifted her onto the kitchen table, as she felt herself bringing her legs around his waist, and as she felt herself—her own fingers—pulling the hem of her cotton traveling skirt up so that the fabric gathered around her thighs, she had already stepped across the room and begun to develop—well, theories, it was the only right word. Theory one: She did this because she wanted to, but perhaps she wanted to because she knew she had to. Theory two: She was the best actress ever to have stepped foot in the state of Texas, because that was the best explanation she could offer for how well she made their bodies fit together, how she matched her gasping breath to his. Theory three: It was possible that someday she would be in love with her husband and desire him in the way he deserved to be wanted, but that day wasn’t today. It wasn’t today.

  She saw herself arch her spine in a curve like a sickle above the surface of the kitchen table; she sensed his mouth on her throat, on her bare breasts; she heard them both try for air that seemed to hang above them, charged and trembling, like an afternoon disturbed by the ringing of bells.

  When it was over, or seemed to be over, John picked her up from the table and she leaned into him gratefully. It seemed to her that she had seen the entire event but had felt very little of it. He carried her to the foot of the stairs, where she slipped out of his arms to climb the steps in the dark herself, holding his hand as he climbed behind her, feeling disheveled and glorious and eerie, like a ghost, and then when they reached the bedroom, John took her in his arms again and undressed her reverently and began the process anew. The process. Within minutes, her bare back sweating into the mattress, she began to feel tired, bored, anxious. More is required of you! Give yourself up! the Rebecca watching from across the room demanded unreasonably. The Rebecca in the bed, though—oh, she was beginning to see the mistake she’d made. This, this tenderness and sweetness, was what she had to expect and endure, and not the bright, hard newness of the kitchen table. You could crave brightness when it shone at you from almost any man. You could endure sweetness only from a man you loved.

  She began to feel angry.

  John lingered over her body this time, kissing her throat, her shoulders, the curve where her brow met the bridge of her nose. Rebecca was hot, uncomfortable. John wasn’t an especially hairy man, but in the damp heat the hair on his chest was curling and clinging to her, which was maddening and awful; his chest and shoulders were slick with sweat and his forehead, too. For her own part, she was drenched—the bedclothes beneath her felt as if they’d been rained on. And she was sticky and sore between her legs, of course—everything down there felt bruised and burned, but most horribly, she could feel the stickiness in her own pubic hair, and one particular sore spot where a hair (or more accurately, if she could bear to think accurately in such a moment, a small clump of hair) kept pressing, sticking, itching, borne repeatedly into a tender, miniscule spot by the pressure of his weight on her. If she dared reach down and just sweep the hair to one side with her finger, the relief would be exquisite, excruciating. If she dared push him away from her, just end it—this, this was worse than unenjoyable; it was painful; it was infuriating. Downstairs, on the kitchen table, she had suspected that they were doing something differently from how it was normally done, and that had contributed both to her enjoyment of it and to her curious abandonment of her body in the place where it set her free. It had been almost a hopeful act.

  But this, oh, this—that spot—it has to end! Why won’t he just end it?

  Having so recently spent himself, and having loved her so long, however, John could no more bring himself to end it than he could thrust his own hand into a glowing stove. So Rebecca was forced to wait, to feel everything she wanted least to feel—smothered, hot, sticky, frictional, unloving, unrelenting. At length she shut her eyes tightly and turned her head to one
side on her pillow, which John seemed to mistake for a sign of her own passion, and which prompted him to arch his hips into hers hideously, harmlessly, ludicrously—now, now it’s over, oh God, this can’t be me.

  John lowered his face into the pillow to the left of her head. The hair at the nape of his neck was moist against her cheek. His body was relaxed, and heavier and hotter than anything she’d ever imagined.

  She wished she felt like laughing. It should have been funny. His expression—the sounds . . . But she wasn’t that mean.

  Not mean, but she was enraged. Not at John, exactly. She didn’t blame him, exactly. It wasn’t his fault. That wouldn’t stop her from punishing him, of course. Making John miserable was, after all, the best and most efficient way of making herself miserable. For she was angriest at herself, at her stupid, animal, trusting idiot self, who had hoped that a mistake she made knowingly would turn out all right, and in so hoping had dealt them both an inhuman blow. It starts and ends here, tonight. This farce. I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself.

  John rolled over, off of her, leaving her body—in itself an unpleasant sensation, leaving as it did a hot puddle between her legs on the sheet. I am expected to sleep in this because I am expected to be in love with him, Rebecca thought furiously. This is no one’s fault but my own. She sat up and impatiently threw off the bedsheet, swinging her legs over the opposite edge of the bed and looking down at her naked body. She was a beauty, was she not? Perfect, if a little thin. She had long legs, full breasts, a narrow waist, thick hair. Her eyes were famous in four counties. She saw blood and moisture on her thighs, nothing she hadn’t expected. In the blue darkness, her white body showed itself to her—remember, this is yours, and almost all that you have. Two of John’s chest hairs clung damply to the swell of her right breast. She lifted a hand and emotionlessly picked them off, flicked them to the floor.

  “Water,” she said coldly. It was a command.

  She heard John propping himself up on his side in the bed behind her. “It’s in the pitcher on the washstand, sweetheart. Can I get you . . . anything? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine.” She stood, her spine as straight as a queen’s, and crossed the room in the hot blue night to the washstand, where she found the pitcher of water, warmed by the day, sitting in an old-fashioned porcelain basin atop a carefully folded white cloth (she guessed old sheeting, hemmed and repurposed by John’s resourceful dead mother), which she swiftly moistened and applied to herself, neck and face first, then her arms and hands, even as the fire and tackiness between her legs screamed out to be soothed and cleansed away. She parted her legs without vanity and cleaned herself, aware that John could see, if he dared watch. When she finished, she carelessly threw the soiled cloth into the basin.

  She turned to the bed then. Her young husband lay naked on his side, watching her with some anxiety, the bedsheet precarious over his hips.

  “I’m sorry if I hurt you, Beck. It’ll get better. It will.”

  What would you know about it, she thought but did not say.

  What she did say was, “You didn’t hurt me. Where is my valise?”

  John pushed himself up, squinting to see her clearly. “Come back to bed for a moment, Rebecca.”

  “No. I would like my nightgown, please.” She forced herself to stand straight and clenched her fists at her sides.

  “Of course,” he said simply. “Your bag is still downstairs, by the door. I’ll bring it.” John rose from the bed. His nakedness was not as shocking as she had thought it would be. She was able to watch him without embarrassment or shyness as he moved through the room, the way another woman might examine a hat or a dog or a plate she thought she might buy. Here is my husband, handsome and prosperous, as God made him, in his bedroom, in the house he helped make himself. John stepped into his trousers and, bare chested, opened the bedroom door—it hadn’t registered on her, earlier, that he had shut it behind him, as if they were in danger of being overheard by anyone, as if there was anyone else in the house—and then she heard his tread descending the stairs.

  She stood naked in her bedroom, relishing the sensation of air moving across her skin, grateful for every moment she didn’t have to spend sweating in the bed. That bed. She eyed it now critically. The mattress was far too soft—she already knew she’d sleep poorly in it. The bedding was too heavy for the weather. John seemed to favor a superabundance of pillows. Something in the sheeting had smelled—not quite stale but vegetable-like. She knew, because he’d mentioned it in passing, that he had a hired girl from one of the big Czech families, and she suspected that he didn’t know how much laundry soap to insist upon. She wasn’t sure herself, come to that.

  She allowed herself to think about the bed’s history. When John’s parents were alive, they had probably slept in this room, because it was the largest one upstairs and one of only two that she happened to know had been finished, with sanded floors and closet doors and furnishings the Hirschfelders had ordered from Austin last summer. But this wasn’t their bed. Before he proposed marriage to Rebecca, but not very much earlier, John had probably moved his own bed into this room and put his parents’ bed into the smaller neighboring room where he used to sleep. She knew this because it would have been the right thing to do and the right way to do it. She knew it because she knew John’s unfailing instinct to do the correct and honorable thing. God damn him.

  John reappeared in the bedroom doorway after an absence that seemed to both of them a mite too long. He could not, even in the darkness, conceal his pleasure at the sight of her.

  “You’re more beautiful than I could have imagined, Beck. You really are.” His voice was low.

  Rebecca cleared her throat and stepped toward him in a businesslike fashion, belied ridiculously, she knew, by the fact that she was naked. She reached out for the handbag in his grasp.

  “No, let me.” On a low dresser between the washstand and the door, he set down the bag, opened it, moved his hands inside as if petting a cat. He pulled out a white cotton gown, new and fine, made especially for her trousseau, that she’d folded tidily on top. He turned and brought it to her, and as he moved closer, the nightgown in his hands, she realized he intended to touch her again. And indeed, before she could process the surprise of this realization—wasn’t her haughty stiffness effective? would she have to practice and perfect it?—here he came, and John’s warm hand had swept behind her, smoothing down the small of her back, following the curve of her waist, cupping her hip.

  This she could not allow. The nightgown was between them, a membrane. She snatched at it.

  John stepped back, releasing her. She found herself glaring at him, feeling real hatred for the first time in her life.

  “I won’t ever do that again,” she declared venomously. “Don’t ask me. Don’t touch me. Don’t approach me. Don’t beg me.”

  John stood still before her, obviously unsure how to respond. She threw the nightgown over her head and thrust her arms through the sleeves. The fabric settled around her calves. She raised her face defiantly, her hair tucked beneath the gown’s collar. When John still said nothing, when she felt her blood cool, when she felt herself to be a bit ridiculous—did she really mean for their marriage to be chaste, forever?—she let loose a breath and reached up to pull her hair out over her shoulders. She realized that she did, in fact, mean for their marriage to be chaste, forever. That she would really prefer it that way. That she should never have married him and that she had broken his heart saying what she had just said, so she might as well go ahead and make it worse, make him hate her, make him regret her choice as much as she did, since neither of them could have much left to lose anyway, and because it was late, it was so late, and she’d never been so tired.

  “I mean it, John,” she said.

  “You mean you don’t love me.”

  “I do not,” Rebecca said stoutly, then amended, for honesty’s sake, “Not
—not in that way.”

  John was silent, and the sound of it was awful, cricket filled—She felt her knees weaken. How much more of this could she—could he—endure? “How could you have married me?”

  “I didn’t know,” she replied. “I know now.”

  John made a small movement then, as if she’d hit him or thrown something at him. He turned jerkily toward the bed. “You know now,” he echoed hollowly. “And I suppose you don’t want children.”

  She knew that he couldn’t bear to look at her. Her heart thudded heavily in her chest—it really felt as if her heart, the organ, were literally shrinking or falling, in some way losing its place in her center. She didn’t know what she was going to say until it escaped her lips, and then the horror of it struck them both so forcibly that the disaster of their marriage was complete and irrevocable.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this. I’ll be your sister, John. It will be like nothing ever happened. I could love you that way. I know I could.”

  Incredibly, he almost seemed to laugh. His expression was agony itself to her, but his eyes were bright, his lips parted, his teeth shining in the blue night. He glanced out the window past their bed; then, in a series of motions so swift and graceful that they were finished before she understood what he was doing, he went to the bedside, picked up his shirt, and was out the bedroom door, swinging himself into his sleeves and then gone.

  * * *

  She waited up for him in the kitchen.

  It took her many long, anguished minutes to find a lamp and then matches. She wanted badly to make coffee, but when she tried to start a fire in the stove, she couldn’t get it to do more than smoke, which forced the humiliating realization that she’d need to wait for daylight to figure out how to work the dampers—it was a different and more modern stove than the one Frau cooked on at her father’s house. Then again, she thought bitterly, John might as well get accustomed to the kind of house she was prepared to offer him: a comfortless one, no warm stove or hot coffee or willing wife.