Obedience by Will Lavender Page A

was just something you do, a commitment that was expected by a petty society. Marriage was reserved for the weakhearted, the suspicious. Mike wore blue jeans and I wore a summer dress. My father was there, taking pictures with one of those disposable cameras. We were so happy.”
    Mike, Dennis thought. He turned the name around in his mind, silently mouthed it.
    “Then, as it goes, things changed. Mike started working all the time. He became consumed with this project at work. Months and months of work. My mother’s curse would burn inside me, mock me, and for a long time I was sickened with myself. Disgusted by my own body. I dropped out of school and fell into a depression. I hated the fact of my own lust, absolutely hated it. When Mike was home I would ravish him, take him in my mouth and suck out everything he was, leave him raw and bleeding. Afterward, I would apologize and feel guilty about what I had done. But something had changed between us. There was some rift there, some sort of divide.”
    She turned and glanced at him. Her eyes were slick and wet. Yet something was in them, some hint of a deeper knowledge. What is she doing? Dennis wondered. What is this?
    “The job got to him,” Elizabeth said. “He was under pressure all the time to finish a project of some sort. I can’t even remember what it was, that’s how important it must have been. Something to do with an animal project.”
    “Animal project?” Dennis asked. “Like dog shows?”
    “No, not like that. Mike was in advertising. Now I remember what it was: Pollyanna Pet Food. There was a girl in the advertisement, this pretty blonde, and she was feeding her cats. The problem, if I recall correctly, was that Mike didn’t like her. He wanted her to be older, more
set.
A professional type. He didn’t want this
bimbo
selling his product. He used that word, bimbo. Are you still listening?”
    “Yes,” Dennis said. She had caught him drifting off.
Mike.
Even though it was a common name, he couldn’t stop tossing it around in his head. “Go on.”
    “He talked about her so much, this actress, that of course I got suspicious. I thought he was fucking her. By that time I was alone all day with nothing to do, and my imagination was free to go wild. Of course I realized how ridiculous it was for me to castigate him for something that may not have even been true.
    “But it swelled and built. Blossomed inside me. The hate for this girl I had never seen. The possibilities ran through my mind like a snuff film. Mike on top of her, Mike behind her, Mike in her mouth. It was eating me from the inside out.
    “Finally, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. When he got home one night I interrogated him about it. ‘I know you’ve been screwing that girl,’ I said. ‘What girl?’ he asked. ‘That actress, that bitch.’ He was flattened. He told me to calm down. Things escalated. He was hurt, I mean really hurt, by what I’d said. And his pain made my anger swell more, so that I was berating him and berating
myself
at the same time. His fake lust was my real lust, and I was scorning it, screaming at it to stop, to leave me be.
    “‘You should calm down right now,’ Mike said to me. At some point he changed, became abrasive. But I couldn’t calm down. I was crazed, maniacal. My mother, my sex drive, the girl in the commercial-everything was coming to a head and I was powerless to stop it. ‘Calm down,’ he said again. And when I wouldn’t, he smacked me. It wasn’t hard. It was just a smack, just a light smack in the face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mouthed afterward. We sat on the couch together, and he cried, and I cried, knowing that it was over between us. The artifice of who I was trying to be in our marriage had been broken, and he had discovered my awful curse.”
    “What did you do then?” Dennis asked. But he already knew. He had already beaten her to that point. Another graduate school, another husband, and now this. Now here, him, Dennis