Jane couldn’t believe she’d said his name out loud to Madeline. Saxon Banks. As if Saxon Banks were just another person.
“Do you want to tell me?” said Madeline. “You don’t have to tell me.”
She was obviously curious, but not in that avid way that Jane’s friends had been the next day (“Spill, Jane, spill! Give us the dirt!”), and she was sympathetic, but her sympathy wasn’t weighed down by maternal love, like it would be if it were Jane’s mother hearing the story.
“It’s not that big a deal, really,” said Jane.
Madeline sat back in her chair. She took off the two hand-painted wooden bangles she was wearing on her wrist and placed them carefully on top of each other on the table in front of her. She pushed the family tree project to one side.
“OK,” she said. She knew it was a big deal.
Jane cleared her throat. She took a piece of gum out of the packet on the table.
“We went to a bar,” she said.
Zach had broken up with her three weeks earlier.
It had been a great shock. Like a bucket of icy water thrown in the face. She thought they were on the path toward engagement rings and a mortgage.
Her heart was broken. It was definitely broken. But she knew it would heal. She was even relishing it a little, the way you could sometimes relish a head cold. She wallowed deliciously in her misery, crying for hours over photos of her and Zach, but then drying her tears and buying herself a new dress because she deserved it because her heart was broken. Everybody was so gratifyingly shocked and sympathetic. You were such a great couple! He’s crazy! He’ll regret it!
There was the feeling that it was a rite of passage. Part of her was already looking back on this time from afar. The first time my heart was broken. And part of her was kind of curious about what was going to happen next. Her life had been going one way, and now, just like that—wham!—it was heading off in another direction. Interesting! Maybe after she finished her degree she’d travel for a year, like Zach. Maybe she’d date an entirely different sort of guy. A grungy musician. A computer geek. A smorgasbord of boys awaited her.
“You need vodka!” her friend Gail had said. “You need dancing.”
They went to a bar at a hotel in the city. Harbor views. It was a warm spring night. She had hay fever. Her eyes were itchy. Her throat was scratchy. Spring always brought hay fever, but also that sense of possibility, the possibility of an amazing summer.
There were some older men, maybe in their early thirties, at the table next to them. Executive types. They bought them drinks. Big, expensive, creamy cocktails. They chugged them back like milk shakes.
The men were from interstate, staying at the hotel. One of them took a shine to Jane.
“Saxon Banks,” he said, taking her hand in his much larger one.
“You’re Mr. Banks,” Jane said to him. “The dad in Mary Poppins.”
“I’m more like the chimney sweep,” said Saxon. He held her eyes and sang softly, “A sweep is as lucky, as lucky can be.”
It’s not very hard for an older man with a black AmEx and a chiseled chin to make a tipsy nineteen-year-old swoon. Bit of eye contact. Sing softly. Hold a tune. There you go. Done deal.
“Go for it,” Gale said in her ear. “Why not?”
She couldn’t come up with a reason why not.
No wedding ring. There was probably a girlfriend back home, but it wasn’t up to Jane to do a background check (was it?) and she wasn’t about to begin a relationship with him. It was a one-night stand. She’d never had one before. She’d always hovered on the side of prudish. Now was the time to be young and free and a bit crazy. It was like being on holidays and deciding to give bungee jumping a go. And this would be such a classy one-night stand, in a five-star hotel, with a five-star man. There would be no regrets. Zach could go off on his tacky Contiki tour and grope the girls on the back of the bus.
Saxon was funny and sexy. They laughed and laughed as the glass bubble elevator slid up through the center of the hotel. Then the sudden muffled carpeted silence of the corridor. His room key sliding in and the instant, tiny green light of approval.
She wasn’t too drunk. Just nicely drunk. Exhilarated. Why not? she kept telling herself. Why not try bungee jumping? Why not leap off the edge into nothing? Why not be a bit naughty? It was fun. It was funny. It was living life, the way Zach wanted to live life by going on a bus tour around Europe and climbing the Eiffel Tower.
He poured her a glass of champagne, and they drank together, looking at the view, and then he removed the champagne glass from her hand and placed it on the bedside table, and she felt like she was in a movie scene she’d seen a hundred times before, even while part of her laughed at his pretentious masterfulness.
He put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her to him, like someone executing a perfect dance move. He kissed her, one hand pressed firmly on her lower back. His aftershave smelled like money.
She was there to have sex with him. She did not change her mind. She did not say no. It was certainly not rape. She helped him take her clothes off. She giggled like an idiot. She lay in bed with him. There was just one point when their naked bodies were pressed together and she saw the strangeness of his hairy, unfamiliar chest and she felt a sudden desperate longing for the lovely familiarity of Zach’s body and smell, but it was OK, she was perfectly prepared to see it through.
“Condom?” she murmured at the appropriate point, in the appropriate low throaty voice, and she thought he’d take care of that in the same smooth, discreet way he’d done everything else, with a better brand of condom than she’d ever used before, but that’s when he’d put his hands around her neck and said, “Ever tried this?”
She could feel the hard clamp of his hands.
“It’s fun. You’ll like it. It’s a rush. Like cocaine.”
“No,” she said. She grabbed at his hands to try to stop him. She could never bear the thought of not being able to breathe. She didn’t even like swimming underwater.
He squeezed. His eyes were on hers. He grinned, as if he were tickling, not choking her.
He let go.
“I don’t like that!” she gasped.
“Sorry,” he said. “It can be an acquired taste. You just need to relax, Jane. Don’t be so uptight. Come on.”
“No. Please.”
But he did it again. She could hear herself making disgusting, shameful gagging sounds. She thought she would vomit. Her body was covered in cold sweat.
“Still no?” He lifted his hands.
His eyes turned hard. Except maybe they’d been hard all along.
“Please don’t. Please don’t do that again.”
“You’re a boring little bitch, aren’t you? Just want to be fucked. That’s what you came here for, hey?”
He positioned her underneath him and shoved himself inside her as if he were operating some sort of basic machinery, and as he moved, he put his mouth close to her ear and he said things: an endless stream of casual cruelty that slid straight into her head and curled up, wormlike, in her brain.
“You’re just a fat ugly little girl, aren’t you? With your cheap jewelry and your trashy dress. Your breath is disgusting, by the way. Need to learn some dental hygiene. Jesus. Never had an original thought in your life, have you? Want a tip? You’ve got to respect yourself a bit more. Lose that weight. Join a gym, for fuck’s sake. Stop the junk food. You’ll never be beautiful, but at least you won’t be fat.”
She did not resist in any way. She stared at the downlight in the ceiling, blinking at her like a hateful eye, observing everything, seeing it all, agreeing with everything that he said. When he rolled off her, she didn’t move. It was as though her body didn’t belong to her anymore, as though she’d been anesthetized.
“Shall we watch TV?” he said, and he picked up the remote control and the television at the end of the bed came to life. It was one of the Die Hard movies. He flicked through channels while she put back on the dress that she’d loved. (She’d never spent that much money on a dress before.) She moved slowly and stiffly. It wouldn’t be until days later that she would find bruises on her arms, her legs, her stomach and her neck. As she dressed, she didn’t try to hide her body from him, because he was like a doctor who had operated on her and removed something appalling. Why try to hide her body when he already knew just how abhorrent it was?
“You off, then?” he said when she was dressed.
“Yes. Bye,” she said. She sounded like a thick-witted twelve-year-old.
She could never understand why she felt the need to say “bye.” Sometimes she thought she hated herself mostly for that. For her dopey, bovine “bye.” Why? Why did she say that? It was a wonder she didn’t say “thanks.”
“See you!” It was like he was trying not to laugh. He found her laughable. Disgusting and laughable. She was disgusting and laughable.
She went back downstairs in the glass bubble elevator.
“Would you like a taxi?” said the concierge, and she knew he could barely contain his disgust: disheveled, fat, drunk, slutty girl on her way home.
After that, nothing ever seemed quite the same.