“I know.”
The air was pearling up as we stuck our feet into desert boots then stepped onto wet sand littered with shell fragments and spread with sticky seaweed.
“We should move higher. The tide.”
We drove to grass and pitched a pup tent between the car and the ocean. I crawled into the sleeping bag as the nylon filtered pinkish orange light. Alex tied the flaps, zipped the screen. He got in beside me, and I pulled off my jeans now that I had his warm legs. I wouldn’t let him see me upright without clothes. Later, I wouldn’t sleep in the same bed at other people’s houses. We tangled together, legs and arms, heart against heart, and he said it again, once, before I slipped into drunken slumber, and I heard it and remembered, and from then on he felt okay saying it and we could talk about it.
I didn’t remember beginning to love him. He built love around me, and I sat inside. I had known him the same as I’d known anyone else. Then something shifted. He named it, and I lingered long enough so all that mattered was staying there. In bed, beside him, I’d catalogue our body parts. His slimmer hips and ankles, our same-sized hands. The few inches he had on me, though neither of us was tall. At the thought of him leaving, my longing throbbed.
Back in Guelph, Alex moved into my room. Soon we had our own apartment overlooking the Speed River. We sealed our love in a ceremony with candles and body painting and acid. We spoke vows and played Hendrix’s “… And the Gods Made Love” as everything reduced to vibrating particles.
We found the rings at the farmers’ market, two entwined snakes, heads meeting. The rings made us husband and wife. I’d used Shore as my last name ever since.
“It’s not about marriage,” he said as we walked along Macdonell Street to the Albion Hotel for fries and a pitcher of draught.
“You don’t believe in it?”
“It’s a convention. What we have is no less valid because we didn’t say the prescribed words and get the paperwork. It’s what we make it. Nobody can take our bond away.”
I’d believed Alex’s words and thought he did, too.
Talking about our crazy first time beside the ocean diverted us from my subpoena, and we moved into the bedroom. Afterward, Alex headed back out to salt the walk. Valentine’s Day, Alex brought a rose. “Bet Ramona never gave you one of these,” he said.
“If she had, it wouldn’t have come in this plastic test tube.”
A few mornings later, Alex pinched his moussed hair into points. He rinsed his hands in my bubble bath and said, “You were lovers, right?”
“You could be talking about anybody.”
He soaped me.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know I was your first. But don’t you wish you’d been one of her sex slaves? You could have learned her techniques and tried them out on me.”
“That’s right. You know how much I like that stuff.”
“Maybe you’d like it more.”
“I doubt that.”
He sat on the side of the tub. “Why didn’t you tell me, Pauline? It hurts me that you didn’t.”
“It’s a sob story. And there’s not much to tell.”
I didn’t want to talk about Ramona again before the trial, especially not to him. My testimony would have the odd cast of a public truth he could react to along with everyone else. If I told him now, the story would enter our relationship. It would live in this house with us. It already lived in my office. I could breathe in there, alone with it, but I couldn’t take it out of the room, let alone share it. I liked how Alex saw me and feared any change that might take him away. Holding onto him was worth any flak he gave me.
“We should tell each other everything. Like lovers do.”
“Why, so we can hurt each other?”
“So we can know each other and stay open.”
“What we call the truth comes back on us.”
“Where is that coming from? What does it even mean? We don’t do that.” He dipped a face cloth in the water then wrung it over me. I took it and spread it out on my chest.
“We would, eventually. Like these sex slave comments. You suspect that since Ramona and James allegedly had sex slaves, that I might have been one of them.”
“I was making a joke. About sex. About something I’d like to try that I thought you might, too.”
“That’s sensitive of you.”
“How is that insensitive? You were friends, you said. What else aren’t you telling me?”
“We were friends. Since I’m part of a trial about this issue, since I did know the woman accused of these things, you might not try to get me to do them.”
“I’m not trying to get you to do the things she’s accused of doing but to have some fun with me. Remember that?”
I sucked in a long, audible breath then heaved it out. He stood. “I don’t know what you’re about. You don’t want me to feel sorry for you. But you’re making it hard for me to feel anything.” He walked out, leaving the door open and the air cool. I drained the water and stayed in the tub. He came back in, coat on, and held out a towel. My skin squeaked against the porcelain as I stood up and let him wrap me.
“Kiss me, so I can go to work,” he said. I gripped his sleeves and kissed hard, relieved. He never went out without saying goodbye.
Fighting with Alex left me revved up, contrite, driven. After breakfast, I put on Nirvana, closed my eyes, and flung my body around. By the end of the song, I screamed along: “A de-nial. A de-nial.”
Panting, I took my library book into my office. I’d given up reading slave narratives from the southern U.S. and returned to true crimes. I’d found one about a girl in California whose captor kept her for seven years, two of which she spent in a box under his waterbed. Through a vent hole she could see a patch of driveway beneath his mobile home. Each day she was let out for a couple of hours to empty her bedpan, eat leftovers, read the Bible. Her hair fell out, her muscles atrophied, and her vision dimmed. She signed a contract and wore a gold collar she believed would identify her to other men who would seize her if she escaped. She had a slave name, K.
I identified with K, though it didn’t make sense. My dad lived half an hour away and Jenna wrote letters. Until recently, I’d had a job, and besides, Alex and I didn’t have that kind of relationship. He joked about tying me up — for fun, he’d said. He didn’t torture me or keep me in a box, and he wouldn’t. I hated that I wanted to read about K. I hated what Alex must see in me when I brought up serial killers and he changed the subject. That I liked to read about other people’s pain, that it didn’t hurt me. It did, though. What K suffered shocked me, and I cried sometimes, though more often she showed up in my dreams. When I read about her watching dawn rise through her vent hole, I got the idea for a pinhole camera.
A hole in the box’s door could project an inverted and reversed
