Strange Fits of Passion by Anita Shreve Page B

drink; it'll help the headache, and I said, No, but thanks.
    He came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders. He began to massage the muscles at the base of my neck. I should have relaxed for him, but I couldn't. I understood this gesture. He would touch me even when I didn't want it, especially when I didn't want it.
    I tried to sit there, pliant, thinking: This will be over soon. But his fingers kneaded the knots in my shoulders too vigorously. I wrenched away suddenly, stood up. I was going to say, I'm not feeling well, I'm better off alone tonight, but he grabbed my wrist, held it.
    I don't remember everything that happened—the room seemed to spin around me very fast. He had me up against the refrigerator; the handle was in my back. His strength was absolute: I'd had only hints of this before. He raised my skirt to my waist. I tried to push him away from me, but he slammed my wrist up against the metal. I felt a sharp stab of pain; I thought that he had broken it. I was frightened then. I knew that he could hurt me, was hurting me. He was a large man—have I said that before?—and though I fought, my fighting him was useless.
    And then I stopped resisting and became a part of it, a passive player. And it seemed, when it was over, and he was holding me, and I didn't want to think about the implications of those few moments, that possibly love or sex or violence was simply a matter of degree. Seen in a certain light, was what had happened against the refrigerator so very different from all that had gone before?
    He carried me to the bed and wrapped me in a blanket. He put ice cubes on my wrist—it was bruised but not broken. He put his mouth on my wrist and said that he was sorry, but curiously, I understood that he meant he was sorry the wrist was hurt, not that he was sorry for the act.
    He made a meal for us, and we ate it on the bed. He seemed grateful to me, and I was aware of a strange sense of our having grown closer to each other, more intimate, as though the more risks we took, the more secrets we shared, the further we pushed the boundaries of what was done, the more entwined we would become.
    In the night I got the fever, and it is possible I am confusing the sequence of what was said or felt, but that was when he wrote my story for me. And that was when he asked me to marry him.
    In the months and years that followed, it was often like that: He'd take something from me, or hurt me, and then offer me something larger in return. And if I took the something larger—a promise or a commitment or a dream—it was understood that I forgave him.
    He never said, then or ever, the word
rape,
and I could not say the word aloud myself.

    I said that I would marry him. He went off to Prague to do a story. I had his apartment to myself. I was sick with the flu. I was sometimes feverish. I didn't go to work.
    Already I felt addicted, or obsessed. I would drink alone, just as we had done together, because it was a thread, it connected us. I would walk to windows, bare windows looking out at traffic and at buildings, and sit for hours, thinking just of him and of us. I would wander rooms and touch his things, go through pockets to find bits of paper that would tell me more about him. I read his notebooks on his desk, tried to think the way he thought.
    Yet even as I did, I knew that we were not like other people. Or if we were like other people, this was a side of love I had not heard anything about. Harrold had had a vision of who I might be, had seen this vision even on the first day we met, was relentless in his pursuit of it. Who I actually was or might have been was merely clay to play with. He saw me as a star, like himself, his protege, his possession. Perhaps I am oversimplifying this, but I don't think so. I was in trouble only if I resisted the vision he had—only if I spoke or acted or felt in a manner that was incompatible with his design.
    Was this my failing, then? My failure to