Coda (Songs of Submission #9) (2 page)

“I, uh—”

“Did you have a neighborhood in mind?” Wendy interrupted me, making eye contact with Jonathan.

“The hills,” Jonathan said. “Beechwood, maybe.”

“Really, I think the ocean—”

“Great. How many bedrooms? Or do you want to go by square feet?”

“Big,” Jonathan told her. “This house is cramped.”

“Cramped?” I interjected. I thought his house was palatial, but I’d grown up with eleven hundred square feet, and I didn’t like being bulldozed.

They both looked at me, and I felt ashamed. Then I felt ashamed for feeling ashamed. I wasn’t embarrassed because Jonathan and I disagreed on the style or size of the house; I was embarrassed because we hadn’t discussed it.

“Wendy, I’m sorry,” I said, standing. “We’re obviously not ready to discuss this. Can we get you to come back some other time?”

“Of course!” she’d chirped and was gone in a flutter.

“What was that?” Jonathan asked.

“We weren’t ready to meet with someone about this. Not until we can agree on the basics. I didn’t…” I drifted a little then came to the truth. “I’ve never bought a house before. I’ve never met with an agent. I didn’t know what was expected.”

He’d looked tired, as usual. He’d always looked tired in those first months, which was why I didn’t talk to him about anything important. I’d tried harder after the non-meeting with Wendy. I agreed to stuff and put my foot down on others, and we bought a big fat compromise of a house that I lived in but didn’t love.

I hadn’t wanted to exhaust him. I thought it was the best way to help him get better. I hadn’t had a period in months from the combination of anxiety and Depo-Provera. But when I got sick and thought I might be pregnant, I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want to start an argument about children. No stress. That was all I wanted.

When he’d gotten back from the hospital, he couldn’t really walk. He just didn’t have it in him. He had a staff of people and a huge family, so he didn’t need me, yet I’d been surprised by how much he did need me. He needed to talk, and in those conversations, he laid out our future like architectural plans, pointing at the lines and angles I needed to see. I rarely disagreed with him. He was prone to frustration with his body and the exhaustion of small tasks, and I was still in a stunned state. I was functional, competent, and emotionally broken. But I’d thought I was handling our situation well. I was the picture of maturity and capability. I even laughed sometimes, when it seemed appropriate.

“Children,” he’d said one night, on his back in the bed. The lights were out, and the flat latte color of the Los Angeles night sky lit the room. “When can we start?”

“You mean start having sex again? Your doctor said anytime.” I leaned over him, half-sitting. His bandage had just been taken off, and the scar on his chest was still pink.

“Fucking with intention.”

“I’ve never known you to fuck without it.”

He smiled and touched my lower lip. “When does that shot wear off?”

My Depo-Provera shots rendered me infertile and nearly menstruation free for two to four months at a time. “Right after Valentine’s Day, I guess.”

“No more shots.”

“Jonathan, I… I think we should talk about that again.”

His expression became wary.

I froze, afraid of upsetting him. “I want children. You have to understand it’s… this is hard to say.” I touched his chest, brushing my fingers over the scar. “Everything seems so precarious.”

“You’ll stop feeling like that once I can walk more than ten fucking feet. Soon.”

“Let’s revisit this then. Please. I just need to know you’re strong enough to handle running out in the middle of the night for chili chocolate ice cream.”

“Who makes that? It sounds disgusting.”

“It’s delicious.”

He pulled me to him, and I laid my head just below his chest. His heart beat in my ear. It sounded perfectly normal, a functioning organ capable of sustaining his body until something else broke. But it wasn’t beating with life. It was a ticking clock, and it would stop too soon.

I’d gotten another shot in early February. I reasoned that he didn’t need to know. I’d put him off. I couldn’t do it much longer, but we were taking it one day, and one white lie, at a time. I’d need the next in June or so, and we could revisit then. Or not.

But it always came up, even when it didn’t. When we talked about the house, we needed a bigger room just for the elephant, and after I dismissed Wendy the realtor, the animal only got bigger.

He’d leaned on the arm of the couch and crossed his ankles, the same posture as the first night I’d gone to see him at his office, when I threatened him with a lawsuit. “Whatever we get should be the exact opposite of what I had before you were in my life.”

“I think that’s reactionary.”

“That’s a big word that means nothing.”

“Don’t build us on top of what you did or didn’t do before. How’s that for a definition?”

Who were we, standing half a room apart with our limbs crossed? How did any of this matter? How had it become important? If he wanted to pass the next ten years in a big modern house overlooking Los Angeles, who was I to say otherwise? Wasn’t that a small price to pay to be with him?

“I want you to go to Paris,” he said. “You’ve never been.”

“Who’s going to watch you if I go? Who will make sure you don’t forget to do what you’re supposed to?”

“If you want children to take care of, that can be arranged.”

“I don’t.”

“Then you don’t need to baby me.”

And that had been that. We got a house by default. The style he wanted and the location I wanted, because on paper, it seemed like a compromise. It had been more of a treaty.

chapter 3.

MONICA

I
 ate a lunch of chicken fingers and half a radicchio salad in the engineering room. I shot the shit with Jerry and Deshawn. We talked about promoting the sampler, getting beer thrown at me in Caracas as a sign of respect, the roaches in the hotel, the excellent food. Half an hour later, we were back to work. Executives drifted in and out to listen to me. Eddie even showed up for fifteen minutes.

My phone was facedown on the baby grand piano; its sheen let me know when the glass lit up with a call or text. But I couldn’t take a text. We were trying to get the last two words of the song right.
Forever fuck
. It had to sound like a powerful curse but be muddled, and on key, and gravelly and transcendent, all at the same time. My feet hurt, and my brain and eyes were so exhausted, the foam egg-carton pattern on the walls seemed inverted.

I couldn’t possibly take a text, even from my husband.

Only when I was done did I check it.

—I want to see you—

The text had come twenty minutes earlier, while I was in the middle of recording “Forever
.
” The song was based on a poem I’d written while Jonathan was in the hospital, and I had been so angry, I imagined myself in an eternal, raging battle with death.

—Where are you?—

Ten minutes later.

—You were supposed to be out two hours ago—

I scrolled through Jonathan’s texts. Jerry and the sound team packed up. I was going to have to deal with my husband. I had my career, and he knew what it entailed. He didn’t have the right to harass me while I was recording.

I took a deep breath and called him from outside. “Hi.” The parking lot behind the studio smelled like sweaty asshole and stale cigarettes.

“You’re out?” Jonathan asked.

“Just finished up.”

“I have a surprise for you when you get home.”

Home. A house on the beach that already had too many painful memories. Medications. Falls. Fights. He’d been sick and pissed. I loved him. I’d never leave him, but some days, I felt as though we were coming apart at the seams.

“The guys are going to dinner. I’m a little hungry,” I said. The silence seemed eternal, and though I imagined him staring into space with the phone at his ear, when I heard a car door slam, I knew he hadn’t been inactive. “Jonathan, it’s—”

“Stay there.”

“Not tonight, I—”

“This sounds to me like you’re telling me no.” The calm, arrogant dominance in his voice was like a slap on the ass, because I hadn’t heard it in six months. “For the sake of clarity, goddess, when it comes to me, that’s not in your vocabulary. I don’t hear it.”

I said, “Yes, sir,” with all the sarcasm of a spoiled adolescent and immediately regretted it. Luckily, my husband had already hung up.

chapter 4.

JONATHAN

T
his shit stopped tonight.

I parked in the back and went into the building. A couple of doors were ajar, and I could hear the laughter and mumblings of men. I heard her three doors down, her voice humming, piano strings getting hammered one by one, slowly.

I slipped into the engineering room and looked at her through the window.

She sat at the keyboard, scribbling in a notebook, then considering the keys again. Her back was straight, neck as long and white as a swan’s, her ebony hair braided and twisted onto the top of her head. A goddess. She’d waited. I didn’t know what would have happened with us if she hadn’t.

The engineering booth was empty and dark, and I watched her like a movie. I saw her bite a fingernail. Close her eyes. Tap a finger then burst out with a word in one long note. It was
you
. She hit three keys, then three different keys, sang the word again in a different register, and wrote it down.

I felt as if I hadn’t seen the length of her neck in months, nor the delicacy of her wrists. I knew every inch of her skin, every curve of her body, yet that day, when she’d said
no
to me, I anticipated the prospect of showing her why that wouldn’t wash any longer with no little delight.

I went back into the hall, closing the engineering room door.

chapter 5.

MONICA

H
is scent cut through the dank musk of the studio before the sound of the door closing reached my ears.

“Hi,” I said without looking up from my notes. “Can we go meet those guys? Jerry wants to lay out a plan for Wednesday.” His fingertips grazed the back of my neck, and I shuddered, closing my eyes halfway.

“No,” he whispered.

“I’ll meet you at home later if you want.”

“Stand up.”

I looked up. He stood over me, hand at the back of my neck, face broaching no arguments. I didn’t know what my expression said, but my mind went utterly dark for a second. I stood, reaching for my bag. He gently took it and laid it back down. I started to object but didn’t get past the first syllable before he had his fingers to my lips.

“Unbutton your shirt,” he said.

We gazed deeply at each other for longer than usual, and I knew even before my fingers touched my shirt that he wasn’t interested in a standard sweet encounter. He brushed his thumb over my lips, across my jaw, and lodged it under my chin, forcing me to look at the dusty fluorescent lights. I undid my buttons in a businesslike fashion while he spoke.

“I haven’t told you this in a long time, so I want to remind you. You are mine. Any time. Any place. Without questions. You get on your knees when I say. You spread your legs when I say. You open your mouth and take whatever I put in it. Do you understand?”

He must have felt me swallow against the heel of his hand. He was back. I didn’t know when or how, but this wasn’t the sick Jonathan who got pissed at his handful of pills. This wasn’t the guy who let me top him, or the man who made love to me fearfully and gently. That man was a good husband. He was difficult, because he felt as if his body wasn’t his own, but a good life mate by any standard.

But for as long as I’d been married, I hadn’t felt safe. Until then, staring at the ceiling, unprepared to hear the voice of my king again. My insides vibrated like a piano string, and I shut my eyes tight against tears.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Pull your pants down.”

I worried about the door. Was it open? And the door to the engineering room. Anyone could walk in.

This was a simple matter of trust, which I’d forgotten how to do.
Trust him. You’re safe with him
.

I opened my pants and wiggled them down. I wore lace and garters, which felt scratchy and uncomfortable under jeans, but I wore them because I’d promised I would, even if I’d promised a different man. He slipped his finger under the straps. His touch had gone electric, exactly right, like when we first met. I felt it through layers of skin and muscle, down to my bones.

“All the way off.”

I stepped out of my pants.

“Why are you crying, goddess?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s your safe word?”

I blurted a laugh to the ceiling. “Fuck. I forgot.”

“Do you want a new one?” He slid his finger under my bra, pushing it up and releasing my breasts. My nipples were hard candies, ready for him.

“Yes, sir.”

“Your choice.”


Invictus
.”

He pinched a nipple and pulled it to the point of delicious pain. “‘Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be, for my unconquerable soul.’”

“Jonathan…” His name was a prayer.

“Turn around.”

I faced the piano, putting my back to him. He slid his hands over my neck and under my shirt collar, pulling the shirt down my arms and drawing his hands over my skin.

“I’m going to ask you something,” he said, pulling my long sleeves halfway off. He twisted the sleeves around my arms, wrapping them and tying them tightly at the elbows.

He paused long enough for me to say, “Sir?”

“Are you happy?” he asked.

I heard the distinct clack of his belt buckle. I didn’t answer. He slid his belt out of his pants with a
whook
.

“I asked you a question.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that the answer?” He gripped the back of my neck.

“It’s confirmation that I heard you.”

With a sharp push, he pinned my face to the shiny black piano. “Are you happy?”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Sure.”

With a thwack that was as hard as it was unexpected, he slapped my ass with his belt. I screamed.

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