False Memory

how?”
    “You wake up?”
    “And I have to change underwear.”
    “You’re sure that’s what it is? The stuff.”
    “It’s disgusting. I feel dirty, used. Sometimes I have to shower, I just have to.”
    Klick-klick. Martie’s heart was racing already, and she sensed that the sight of the gleaming blades would plunge her into a full-fledged panic attack far worse than anything that she had experienced previously. Klick-klick-klick.
    “But, Sooz, good God, you mean he makes love to you—”
    “There’s no love involved.”
    “—he does you—”
    “Rapes me. He’s still my husband, we’re just separated, I know, but it’s rape.”
    “—but you don’t wake up during it?”
    “You’ve got to believe me.”
    “All right, of course, honey, I believe you. But—”
    “Maybe I’m drugged somehow.”
    “When would Eric be able to slip the drugs to you?”
    “I don’t know. All right, yeah, it’s crazy. Totally whacked, paranoid. But it’s happening.”
    Klick-kiick.
    Without opening her eyes, Martie pushed the drawer shut.
    “When you wake up,” she said shakily, “you’ve got your underwear on again.”
    “Yes.”
    Opening her eyes, staring at her right hand, which was knotted around the drawer pull, Martie said, “So he comes in, undresses you, rapes you. And then before he goes, he puts your T-shirt and panties on you again. Why?”
    “So maybe I won’t realize he’s been here.”
    “But there’s his stuff.”
    “Nothing else has that same smell.”
    “Sooz—”
    “I know, I know, but I’m agoraphobic, not totally psychotic. Remember? That’s what you told me earlier. And listen, there’s more.”
    From inside the closed drawer came a muffled klick-klick.
    “Sometimes,” Susan continued, “I’m sore.”
    “Sore?”
    “Down there,” Susan said softly, discreetly. The depth of her anxiety and humiliation was more clearly revealed by this modesty than it had been by anything she’d previously said. “He’s not... gentle.”
    Inside the drawer, blade pivoting against blade: klick-klick, klickklick.
    Susan was whispering now, and she sounded farther away, too, as though a great tide had lifted her beachfront house and carried it out to sea, as if she were steadily drifting toward a far and dark horizon. “Sometimes my breasts are sore, too, and once there were bruises on them... bruises the size of fingertips, where he’d squeezed too hard.”
    “And Eric denies all this?”
    “He denies being here. I haven’t... I haven’t discussed the explicit details with him.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I haven’t accused him.”
    Martie’s right hand remained on the drawer, pushing against it as though something inside might force its way out. She applied herself with such intensity that the muscles in her forearm began to ache.
    Klick-klick.
    “Sooz, for God’s sake, you think maybe he’s drugging you and screwing you in your sleep, but you haven’t confronted him about it?”
    “I can’t. I shouldn’t. It’s forbidden.”
    “Forbidden?”
    “Well, you know, not right, not something I can do.”
    “No, I don’t know. What an odd word—forbidden. By whom?”
    “I didn’t mean forbidden. I don’t know why I said that. I just meant... well, I’m not sure what I meant. I’m so confused.”
    Although she was distracted by her own anxiety, Martie sensed something profound in Susan’s word choice, and she wouldn’t drop the issue. “Forbidden by whom?”
    “I’ve had the locks changed three times,” Susan said, instead of answering the question. Her voice rose from a whisper, sharpened by a brittle note of nascent hysteria that she was struggling mightily to repress. “Always a different company. Eric can’t know someone at every locksmith, can he? And I didn’t tell you this before, because maybe it makes me sound loopy, but I’ve dusted the windowsills with talcum powder, so if he did come through a locked window somehow, there’d be evidence of it, there’d be handprints in the powder, some mark of disturbance, but the talcum is always perfect in the morning. And I’ve wedged a kitchen chair under the doorknob, too, so even if the bastard has a key, he can’t open the door, and the next morning the chair is always there, where I put it, yet I’ve got his stuff in me, in my panties, and I’m sore, and I know I’ve been used, brutally, I know it, and I shower and shower, hotter and hotter water, so hot it hurts sometimes, but I can’t get clean. I never feel really clean anymore. Oh, God, sometimes I think what I need are exorcists—you know?— some priests to come here and pray