ALL I SEEMED TO HAVE THAT NIGHT WAS Raphaël. We hadn’t made love since he told me about what had happened to him as a little boy. When we were first married, he would come home and start kissing me and trying to put his hands up my shirt before he had even taken his coat off. I would scream bloody murder because his hands were so cold.
But the worst of it now was that he was obsessed with me having an affair. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to me.
I was standing naked at the bathroom sink, feeling at a loss as to what I was going to do if we broke up. I took my black sweater and a red leather skirt off the hooks on the back of the bathroom door and put them on. I put some makeup on. I had promised to go to the bingo hall with Loulou. I picked up my boots from beside the front door, sat on a kitchen chair and pulled them on.
Raphaël walked into the kitchen. He was drinking instant coffee out of a teacup. He leaned against the counter and watched me.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“The bingo hall.”
“Bullshit. Look at you. No one dresses up like that to go to the bingo hall.”
“What are you trying to say?”
Raphaël had started asking me all these detailed questions. He was trying to sink my battleship.
He sat down and lit up a homemade bong he’d fabricated out of a 7UP bottle. The smoke swirled inside it, looking like a mermaid trapped in an aquarium, banging on the walls. After he exhaled, he pulled a pair of yellow underwear out of his pocket and held them up.
“Where the fuck did these come from?”
I blushed because I had taken them out of somebody else’s laundry bin. He took my blush as confirmation that I had received them as a gift. He went into my closet. He ripped all the pretty dresses off the coat hangers, shoving them into a huge garbage bag. He tossed the bag right out the window. I sat on the side of the mattress, speechless.
I knew that we were one fight away from splitting up. So I just let him act crazy, like I was watching a television show.
The next morning, as I was waiting for the bus to go to work, I looked back up at the window and saw Raphaël standing in it, watching me. When I finished my shift, I saw him sitting in the restaurant across the street from the magazine store.
That evening he came home early from work. He walked right past me and threw open the window and looked down the fire escape to see if someone was running down it. The cold air rushed in. It made me feel incredibly naked, even though I had my clothes on. I just decided to ignore him and continue reading. He sat next to me on the bed. He held up one of the pillows to his nose and inhaled. He kissed me really hard. Then he almost pushed me away and went to the kitchen to smoke a cigarette.
He thought it was weird that I was wearing perfume. He thought that it was because I was trying to mask some other smell. He dumped my purse out on the kitchen table. He was perplexed because there were about twelve half-used tubes of lipstick. A girl who sold for Revlon had given me her samples.
It was driving me batty that he kept trying to put two and two together. I got caught up in his madness, I suppose. I started going through his things too. I was trying to find out what he was up to.
I found a notebook in his underwear drawer. I took it out and opened it. On the first page, he had written, “The End of Beginnings.” I had no idea what it was about lunatics that made them almost sound like geniuses. I sat on the edge of the bed to read what was inside. He had written down all my comings and goings. He had noted that there was somewhere that I snuck off to at 4:20 every day. I was frightened. I put the notebook back where I’d found it. I wished I had never seen it. His defence mechanisms were leading him down a dangerous path. He had made a mistake trusting someone once, and now he was examining me under a microscope. How could anybody withstand that kind of scrutiny?
If you want to see yourself the way the devil sees you, then read your sweetheart’s diary.
Nouschka was moving a strand of spaghetti into the shape of a heart.
Nouschka was in the bathtub for an hour reading Anna Karenina.
Nouschka bought a postcard of a boxer, although she had no intention of mailing it to anyone.
Nouschka put her teacup on the windowsill. The cat jumped up and drank out of it, but Nouschka didn’t say anything.
Nouschka was crying while reading the newspaper.
Nouschka stopped outside the building and just stood there for a few minutes before coming upstairs.
Nouschka put her hand out to see whether or not it was raining, even though it clearly wasn’t.
It almost seemed like I was reading about someone I had never met. It was the sketch of a Russian novel—except the author hadn’t yet come up with the tragedy that would befall the female protagonist. But even I could see that she was already dissatisfied.
I decided to try harder to prove my love and to somehow get our relationship back to the way it was just a few months before. Later, I went into the bathroom while Raphaël was leaning into the mirror and shaving. All I had on was a pair of green woollen tights and a lavender bra, which must have been from the fifties, from the thrift store. It was the prettiest thing I owned. He made love to me every single time that I took my sweater off and was wearing it. I sat on the toilet with the lid down. It was a feat, because even though we had the heat pumped up, it was still always cold in the apartment. I was pouting my lips and tilting my head in a way that I hoped was attractive.
“Raphaël?” I asked, as sweetly as I could. “Do you think about me when you’re riding the bus? Do you think maybe we’ll go on a holiday together by the seashore? We could bring some Polish sausage and beer. Do you find that half the characters in books remind you of me?”
I was trying to get him to compliment me like he used to.
“What I wonder sometimes is why a girl like you would go for me. Unless maybe someone put you up to it.”
We were both quiet for a spell. We just stared, trying to figure one another out. We were wondering what the other’s game plan was.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
And after that night, I was.