Eat Your Heart Out by Katie Boland Page B

so many I’ve lost count. James is the first man I have fooled for a long time, the only man who has promised to take care of me.
    I’ve grown old and my looks have faded, I wear my promiscuity like a memory, a stale perfume that I can’t wash of my body.
    How do you begin today with all of yesterday still inside you?
    Sometimes, still, I’ll catch a mouse and take great pleasure in crushing it with my fist. Bodily fluids do not move me; blood, semen, tears—none of these weigh heavy on me.
    As the big day approaches, I find myself studying James when he is asleep. He looks so helpless. More helpless than I could ever be in the most dire of situations, and this helplessness radiates off him in his sleep. Looking at him, I feel like a monster in a fairy tale: hairy, yellow-eyed, and mute. I want to crush him like that bird, sit on him until he suffocates.
    When I wake from these spells I am horrified because I thought I knew better than this.
    I promise myself daily that I will be discreet and that I will only take other men when I feel like I’m drowning. I will be a good wife to James.
    I repeat this to myself over and over, hoping, somehow to believe it.
    Some nights, I feel so torn that I cannot share a bed with him and sleep alone on the wood floor beneath him.
    He is taking me on a getaway this weekend; “some time alone before the wedding,” he told me.
    â€œIsn’t it beautiful?” he asks, waking me from a sleep that until now I wasn’t certain I had fallen into.
    I look out the window of our red Ford truck that’s covered in road dust. I lift my head and straighten my shoulders to get a better look at what’s on the other side of the glass. The clear, hard sky stretches for miles. Mountains, presidential in the distance, dwarf every tree and farm around them. It is breathtaking. Being around so much space I feel myself wanting to wander like a lonely buffalo.
    â€œBaby?” he asks.
    I had forgotten James was in the car with me.
    â€œYes, beautiful,” I tell him. My accent is barbed with the softness only sharpshooters can imitate, sounds different in my own head, when I am alive in thought, than it does when I speak to him, dead in conversation. I don’t understand where the pretense comes from, but I am being dishonest with my voice when I speak, except within the confines of my own skull. My real drawl is lower, has more gruffness, and a depth that I don’t share with anyone, guarded like jewels.
    He smiles at me, and then he puts his hand on mine, and I keep it there until the car stops. That is what normal people who are in love do.
    If I can convince him, how far behind am I?
    When the car stops, James and I bring our luggage to the front door of the cabin. As I slam the trunk, I feel his hand graze my ass.
    We are kissing on the doorstep now, and I feel his excitement, about us, about the future, about everything that life offers most people. His hands travel all over my body, with an increasing pressure, and for a moment I feel sad. I have never felt excited, not like that, about anything in my life. I can mimic excitement, as I am now, by mirroring his actions, putting my hands on his body where he puts his on mine.
    But right now my body acts like an orchard of bones. James takes my hand and leads me through the cabin up the stairs to our bedroom. He lays me down and undresses me. His touch is soft and I am used to it.
    â€œYou feel so good,” I tell him.
    I am not lying. He does feel good. He is different than the other men. We are gentle with each other where they used to bruise me, bite me, make me bleed. Usually, I hide my body from James until my map of scars, traces of the other men are gone.
    When I look untouched, like now, our bodies fit together well, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It doesn’t feel satisfying, only like kindness’s sister. He cups my left breast in his hand. I wrap my legs around him. We begin.
    As