GLENN COUGHLIN
AUGUST 14, 1980
KEITH’S not here, Glenn. He’s got an extra shift tonight. I thought that if anyone knew that, you would have,” Evelyn said.
Glenn Coughlin had come boiling straight in through the door like he owned the place, like always. Glenn Coughlin, smelling like grease and welding rods. Smelling like Keith’s smell. But different, too. Glenn Coughlin closing the door behind him, checking the lock. Thumb and forefinger turning the never-closed lock with a quiet snick. Glenn in his forties then, big and square and strong.
The windows were all open, the curtains touched now and then with the slight breeze darting in, but mostly they were hanging straight down.
The air still. Ten-thirty and airlessly hot, St. John’s houses not designed for heat, flat black tar roofs, the people under them never really getting around to expecting the heat until it was piled all over them like extra blankets they couldn’t shed.
Evelyn was standing in the doorway to the living room, the television lighting the room behind her with moving blues and greens. Hands up in front of her breasts, sheltering already. Wearing a skirt that hung just below her knees. Wishing now that she was wearing something else.
“I know, Ev,” Glenn said. “Keith’s on the double, working on some Russian boat with hull damage. They hit something in the night in open ocean, no one on watch to see anything. They sank it, probably, and they don’t even know what it was.”
He stopped talking. Smiled. Not a nice smile, Evelyn thought.
“I know all that,” he said. He looked at his fingernails for a moment, as if hunting down some particularly stubborn dirt under the hard rims. “I also know whatever they hit was painted red. And I know Keith’s down welding in the bow tubes, that he’s got another three hours of work down there if there’s a minute of it, packed in tight enough that he can barely lift his arms up, the fans sucking the torch smoke out. But I wasn’t looking for him, was I?”
Glenn’s hand smelled of cigarette smoke when it was up next to the side of her face, and Evelyn turned her chin away in shock at the close familiarity of his touch. He had crossed the distance between them in a single motion, one long step. His other hand was set now in the curve in the small of her back.
“How’d you get stuck with Keith, anyway?” Glenn said, close enough to the side of her face that she could feel the heat of his exhaled breath. “He’s just a little man, Ev, thinks he’s somethin’ special, bigger than he really is.”
“You shouldn’t be here, Glenn,” Evelyn said.
She said the words even though she recognized that they sounded flat the moment they came out of her mouth, flat and resigned, as if they were really only the things she felt she was supposed to say and didn’t have the strength or conviction to carry off properly.
The things you’re supposed to say to keep up appearances. The things you say for form. She knew she was supposed to throw them out there, and she knew already that Glenn was going to ignore them.
She also knew that everything was going to unfold the way she realized it would the moment she saw him coming through the door. That he was bigger and stronger than her, and that everything she did now was a matter of hedging bets, of making the best out of the worst.
Falling, and it was already too late to do anything about it.
She ran through all the options in seconds—all the big things she could do, the fighting back, the screaming (and with the windows open, they’d hear her all over the neighbourhood, sure they would). Evelyn thought about it all, and then thought better of all of it, too.
Everything would get so complicated—that was her first thought. She would think about that later, wonder why the first thing she thought about was that resisting would create all kinds of complications she wasn’t ready to deal with. That it could be fast and uncomfortable and awful, but that then it would be done.
She thought about it being done, and she thought about it more as he muscled her back against the wall like he was moving a mannequin into position in a store window. And she let her arms hang down at her sides as if she couldn’t move them at all.
Glenn was pushing up her skirt, eager and fast, his other hand undoing his pants, pushing her back hard against the wall, driving a bit of her breath out through her lips like a sigh. And the only thing she could find to think about was how to make the whole thing smaller and farther away from her, crumpling it up small like a sheet of old tinfoil.
Glenn was breathing hard, his mouth next to her ear, his hips thrusting against her. His breath sounding angry—his hands rough and scraping, reaching under her clothes, tearing fabric away from her when it didn’t slide fast enough.
“You like it, don’t you? You want it. You know it. You all high and mighty. Looking down your nose at everyone. Looking down your nose at me,” he said, his hands clenching behind her, pulling her hard against him.
Evelyn tried to remember if she’d ever said anything of the kind, tried to make sense of whatever it was he was talking about, all the time feeling somehow that she was really in another room, watching everything from a distance, from out in the trees.
Except for the pain of his rough hands on her skin. The feeling of him. The way it felt like her own skin was pulling away from his, revolted.
It was, at least, quick. She felt the wet on the insides of her thighs, and he was leaning into her, still and breathing heavily. Thinking that it was almost over, and that then there would be the soft of him, he would shrink inside her and his need would too, and then there might even be apologies, even if he didn’t get around to actually saying them.
Her clothes were rumpled up against her skin and damp, and she realized that she was breathing heavily too, physically aroused and hating herself for her body’s response, a sharp pinprick of disgust poking at her from inside.
The weight of him leaning against her. Making her stomach roil like she was going to throw up.
Outside, the world was continuing, oblivious.
“You’d better get going,” she said, feeling as if she were dismissing a guest who’d foolishly stayed too long, freeing herself from the drape of his arms. At the same time, feeling all at once different. “You wouldn’t want to be here when Keith gets home.” Saying it made her a little bolder and she kept going. “You wouldn’t want me to have to explain just what it is you’re doing here.”
But she realized that she’d let her voice drop a note with the last word, giving the sentence a declining pitch in its last few words, realized the failing strength of her voice, from the definite to the tentative. And she knew as well that he had heard the change.
“What do ya mean?” Glenn said. “That he’s going to find out? That what? That you’re going ta tell Keith ’bout this?” Glenn laughed then, the laugh turning into a smoky, rich cough.
Glenn pulled away from her, and she felt her body almost sag reflexively towards him as he moved away.
“You go right ahead,” Glenn said. Pants back up to his hips, zipper being zipped, door unlocked again, snicker-snack, the door yawning open. Glenn away from her and moving into the rectangle of the door frame and somehow changing, going back to being all too familiar, everyday Glenn, time itself turning suddenly into single frames, every movement fragmenting as she watched.
“You go ahead. Go ahead and tell him. Hey, maybe he knows already. Maybe he can guess. And maybe he owes me anyway, so even if you do tell him, he’ll just keep quiet. Up to you.”
Evelyn, unable to shed the thought that something critical had changed, that she was different. Her balance completely gone, her hands turned backwards and pressed hard against the wall behind her, desperate for the familiar support.
When Glenn left, when the door was closed and the room was once again just the room, she let her breath come out in a long gasping rush that turned into a shuddering sob, staggered into the bathroom, where she found she was bleeding. There were long, deep scratches, scarlet, on the backs of her thighs, scratches that she’d have to find some way to hide from Keith.
And by the next morning she began to wonder if there was something else she’d have to keep hidden from him, at least until she was far enough along to go down to the doctor and get a test done. A test for something she wondered if she knew already.