I don’t meet his eyes. My neck is hot. “I married you. I sacrificed my life for you. My family doesn’t even speak to me—” He flinches. He hates when I mention them. “I accept you. Graham. I accept you; don’t you understand? When no one else would.” He doesn’t have a monopoly on manipulation.
“That’s not enough. She wants you to embrace us.” He sucks a speck of sauce off his pinkie finger. “Does this have crack in it?”
I don’t want to play. It’s different when it’s them, when it’s something I see at a distance. Something I am aware of, but can easily ignore.
I got too close to the last one. There was something about her I liked: an innocence, a hopefulness, like she expected the fairy tale was in the castle, when it’s always in the woods that the princess learns what really matters.
“What do you want?” I shove my plate forward, finished. I don’t know why he likes it so much. It tastes like something out of a can. “What is it that you want from all this?”
He leans back in his chair, stretches his taut stomach. “I want what everyone wants: to be entertained.”
“But when is it going to be enough?”
He swallows so hard, I can see it. I think I detect a sadness behind his eyes. But maybe his eyes are just beautiful; maybe that’s the sadness. Everything is shallow with Graham: his looks, his thoughts, his actions. And there is something so attractive about that, the lack of depth. No hidden parts. No secret baggage.
But I think it hurts him sometimes, his shallowness. The way nothing matters. This pain is the thing I love most about him, because it is the thing we share: the dread, the fear, that nothing matters. Or worse, that it does for everyone else but us.
I get out of my chair and go to him. I bring his head to my stomach and he lets me. I brush his black, black hair. He’s like a predator I have caught, a monster I can hold in my hands.
I bend my knees, try to slide onto his lap.
“Don’t.” I freeze. He fixes the hair I brushed out of place. “There’s nothing more vulgar than trying to seduce your spouse.”
I wobble in place for a second, uncertain. Then I stand. Graham sets his jaw and overlooks me as I clear his plate. Then he goes to his chair at the end of the floor, the one with armrests that look like wings. He puts his socked feet on the ottoman and scrolls through the news on his phone, announcing all the bad things that are happening like they make him feel better.
“Stock market’s fucked! That fire’s at one hundred thousand acres! Another hurricane!”
And that night, we lie down in bed together, like we do every night and we will every night forever. He lets me touch him for the first twenty minutes, stroke his hair, follow the tight, muscled lines of his body with my fingers, smell the musky scent that oozes from his neck. Then he scoots away, gets down to the business of sleeping. I slide to my side of the bed to worry.
His breathing pattern slows as I gaze up at the ceiling, the tiny light fixtures like pinpricks. My stomach churns with thoughts of the game, my turn. I don’t want to play. There has to be some way out of it. Maybe I can prove myself to Graham another way. Maybe I can make him love me, finally.
He whimpers in his sleep. He always has bad dreams. Almost every night, a light squeal escapes his lips; his eyelids flicker. I used to ask him what he dreamed about. “You were crying,” I would tell him. “You were crying in your sleep.” But he always claimed not to remember. “I never dream anything,” he said. “I never have dreams.”
I brush the soft hairs on his neck to comfort him. He seizes on a sigh, then goes quiet.
Sometimes I ask myself why I stay. But I have known money long enough to realize that it always comes with strings attached. And I have known the world long enough to know that at its core, it’s a game. Either you play or you are the one being played with.
LYLA
The housekeeper arrives as promised, early the next morning. I go out to let her in. “I’ll have to make you a key,” I say, leading her into the house. I have ordered in breakfast because we don’t have anything in the cupboards. She puts the food on plates.
Graham doesn’t even notice her. He has been raised not to see help. He allows me to kiss him at the door, distracted. “Margo is going to forward you the e-mail.”
I want to protest but instead I nod. There must be a way to get out of this. I ask the housekeeper to clean but she doesn’t have any products.
“Everyone brings their own!” I say, exasperated. “We don’t have cleaning products; we only have Mo?t!” I give her money to buy some at the market. “Make sure you get bleach. And buy groceries, too. Just whatever normal people get. But better.”