Broken

“I don’t know what her problem was.” Joe chewed and swallowed. A pearl of mayonnaise clung to the corner of his mouth, and I pushed a napkin toward him.

“She’d just lost her virginity to a stranger. Maybe she felt awkward.”

Of course, I had no idea what Mary felt, any more than I knew what any of Joe’s women thought or felt. My imagination filled in the details of their coupling, taking what he told me and painting a picture from the feminine point of view.

“She was on me like butter on a biscuit. How was I supposed to know she was a virgin? She didn’t act like one.”

“How’s a virgin supposed to act?”

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. But she acted like she knew exactly what she wanted. So why was she so upset when she got it?”

I didn’t answer for a moment, thinking. “Maybe she was disappointed.”

He gave me the grin, the bad boy smile. “Sadie, I did not disappoint her.”

“Oh, that’s right. You made her a woman.”

Joe frowned. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“No. Losing my virginity didn’t make me a woman. Did it make you a man?”

His one-eyed squint shouldn’t have been as enchanting as it was. “I lost my virginity to Marcia Adams, my mother’s best friend. It made me a man pretty fast. I wouldn’t have survived it, otherwise.”

This is a story I’d never heard and my face must have shown it. Joe laughed, one eye still squinted, face tipped up toward the atrium’s glass ceiling.

“Are you going to tell me about it?”

He looked, for one strange moment, shy. I hadn’t thought him capable of it. He shifted on the bench, and I was sure he was for once not going to tell me.

“I was seventeen. She asked me to take care of her garden. Money for college. She told me I could use her pool every day, when I was done mowing the lawn.”

“Sounds like you did more than mow her lawn.”

He rubbed a hand along the back of his neck. “Yeah.”

“And you really think that’s what made you a man?”

I watched him curiously. He turned to look at me, his face solemn and nodded slowly.

“Yeah. I think it showed me what to expect, anyway.”

“I’m not sure that’s the same thing.”

“Well, if losing your virginity didn’t make you a woman,” he said, “what did?”

I said nothing to that, a topic into which I didn’t wish to delve. After a moment, he shrugged. “Mary acted like I was handing her a twenty and kicking her out.”

“Maybe she assumed you were the sort of guy who picks up women in bars and sleeps with them, then expects them to leave.”

“I’d have let her shower first!” He cried, indignant. “Jeez, I’m not a total asshole.”

Yet he didn’t deny he was, indeed, the sort of man who picks up women in bars and sleeps with them, perfectly satisfied with one night.

I didn’t respond, just sipped my drink. Joe set his sandwich down. The sun shining through the glass overhead cut through the giant Boston ferns hanging above us and striped shadows in his dark blond hair. His frown pulled his full mouth into thinness.

“Say it.”

I pretended not to know what he meant.

“Say it,” he repeated. “You want to. I can see it in your eyes.”

“Say what?” I relented. “That you are the sort of man who does that?”

“Keep going.” He sat back against the bench, his arms crossed.

I smiled. “That you’re a cheater? A rogue? That you don’t know the meaning of fidelity? That you go through women like wind through lace?”

“Don’t forget that I’m a silver-tongued devil who’ll say anything necessary to get into a woman’s pants. That my Holy Grail is pussy. That I’ve split more peaches than a porn star.”

I laughed. “Split more peaches? That’s a new one.”

Joe wasn’t laughing. “Go on and say it, Sadie. I’m a manwhore. You think I’m a slut.”

I studied him before I answered. “Joe…”

He wrapped up his food and stood, then tossed it in the pail next to me. He moved like a marionette dancing under the hand of an uncertain puppeteer, all jerks and twitches. He was angry. Really angry, and I stood, too.

“Joe, stop.”

He turned to me. His suit today was black, his shirt bright blue, his tie black with tiny blue dots scattered on the fabric. He put his hands on his hips, ruining the cut of his suit, which probably cost as much as my car payment.

More shadows speckled his blue-green eyes, his high cheekbones, the slope of his nose. No sign of a smile. His glare wrinkled the corners of his eyes, and it wasn’t fair they only made him better looking instead of haggard.

“I know you think it, so you might as well say it.”

“But, Joe,” I said gently. “It’s true.”

“It won’t always be true!” His words rang out, echoing.

The plants seemed to recoil, startled at this shout interrupting their usual peace.

I shouldn’t have scoffed, but his anger had made me angry, too. “Oh, please.”

Joe stalked toward me. I didn’t move away. He stood only a few inches taller but he seemed bigger in his anger. I refused to flinch even when he leaned in so close he could have kissed me, if he’d wanted. This was my role, disinterested observer, as his was playful rogue. I acted as though I wasn’t intimidated, though the truth was, being so close I could count his eyelashes, smell him, feel the heat of his breath on my face, I was. Underneath, I always was. Intimidated and turned on.

“It’s true,” he insisted through gritted teeth.

“I’ve heard that before. But every month you come back here and tell me a new story about some new woman. Or more than one. So you’ll have to forgive me if the idea of you suddenly becoming Mr. Faithful sounds a little funny.”

He jerked away from me, his finger pointing. “And every month, you listen.”

I lifted my chin. “Is it my fault you have stories to tell?”

He made a disgusted noise and gestured with his hands as if he was throwing something away. Maybe me. I wasn’t sure.

“I don’t have to prove myself to you.”

“No,” I agreed. “So why are you trying so hard?”

We’d never argued. Arguments were for people more intimate than I’d ever have admitted we were. Now my heart thumped and heat rose in my cheeks. My stomach churned and a sharp sting in my palms made me realize I’d clenched my fists. So much for the cool demeanor. I relaxed them with conscious effort, and the motion drew Joe’s gaze. He looked at my hands, then back at my face.

“What about you? What are you trying to prove?”

“Me?” The question surprised me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Why do you listen?”

Now it was my turn to gather up my garbage and toss it in the trash. I gave him my back, intensely aware I didn’t have to see him to know he was looking at me.

“Not so nice when it’s turned around on you, is it?” I could hear his smirk.

I looked at him again. “I’ve been listening to your stories for more than a year now, Joe. I guess it’s just become a bad habit.”

His body didn’t flinch, but his eyes did. “Bad habits should be broken, though, right?”

He turned on his heel and stalked away. Panic flared in me. He was messing up the parts we’d been playing for the past two years. What did that mean? That he wouldn’t be back? Or just that he wouldn’t have another story?

“Joe!”

He didn’t turn, and I had too much pride to call after him again. I waited until he’d disappeared beneath the hanging greens and I was alone in the quiet before I sat on the bench again, my mutilated fists in my lap.

The flowers reproached me, but since they had no voice, I didn’t have to listen.

Chapter 02

I met Adam at a party my freshman year of college. Not at a frat house, this party was at “lit house,” a three-story Victorian monstrosity that had been home to half the English department, grads and undergrads, for as long as anyone could remember. It was its own frat house, in a way, though the graffiti on the basement walls featured quotes from Wilde, Shakespeare and Burns, and the limericks were clever in addition to being filthy. I was there by invitation of my roommate Donna, an English major.

I wasn’t much a fan of beer, but I carried a cup anyway. Donna had abandoned me to hook up with a cute guy from one of her classes. I moved among the crowd in search of the bathroom, listening to drunken discussions about iambic pentameter and poetic imagery along the way.

In the kitchen, looking for the toilet I’d been assured was “just through there,” I found Adam. He lounged on top of the kitchen counter, his incredibly long legs encased in faded blue corduroy pants, immense feet shod in the shabbiest brown oxfords I’d ever seen. He wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a famous punk rock band. He had an earring glittering in one lobe and long hair. He had a cigarette in one hand and a green short-neck bottle of Straub beer in the other.

“Bathroom?” When I nodded, he pointed to the small door just beyond the door to the cellar. “The door doesn’t lock. But I’ll watch out for you.”

He flashed me a grin of perfect white teeth, the upper front tooth slightly crooked. I was smitten. I used the bathroom and came out to find him in discourse about the writing of Anaïs Nin and how it compared to present-day erotica. I didn’t leave the kitchen for the rest of the night.

It was the first time I ever got drunk.

Later, stumbling home, Donna asked me who he was.

“I don’t know,” I said with beer-bleary lips. “But I’m going to marry him.”

Two weeks later, as I left my room to go to class, I saw him leaving a message on the door of Rachael Levine, my resident assistant. Rachael was fond of lecturing the rest of us on the dangers of drinking too much and having indiscriminate sex. She didn’t seem much good at applying the same lectures to herself, though, even at twenty-two still hitting the frat parties and making a point of leaving her ample supply of condoms out in her room for anyone to see. She also liked bragging about her “brilliant” boyfriend.

His name was Adam Danning.

He turned and flashed me the smile that had so intoxicated me. “Hey. I know you.”

Between one heartbeat and the next, my entire life changed.

“You’re Sadie.”

He knew my name.

How did I talk to him? Tall, handsome Adam. Brilliant lecturer on the differences between erotica and pornography. Drinker of Straub beer and smoker of Marlboro. Boyfriend of Rachael.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to talk much. He walked me to class and spoke about his work in the English department. About the University. About a movie he’d seen the night before. He made it easy to be silent, and I drank his words with more enthusiasm than I’d consumed the beer.

“Lit house party this weekend,” he said as we parted ways at the top of the hill, he to work and I to my introduction to psychology class. “Will you be there?”

Oh, yes. I’d be there.

Six weeks into my first semester, we were eating lunch together three or four times a week and walking to class more often than that. We talked about everything. Politics, movies, art, books, sex, drugs and rock and roll. He recited poetry to me. Adam introduced me to the power of words.

He never talked about Rachael, though she spoke of him, often, to anyone who’d listen and anyone who didn’t. Though Adam and I made no secret of the time we spent together, she didn’t seem to consider me a threat. She went out of her way, in fact, to take me under her wing. She gave me advice, unsolicited, and kept back rolls of toilet paper for me during rush week when the fraternity pledges were ordered to steal it from the dorms and all the stalls went empty. She treated me like an amusing, perhaps slightly retarded, younger sister. She didn’t view me as a threat, probably because I’d carried my “smart” façade along with me from high school. If I’d been “the pretty one,” she might have worried more.

Adam quickly became the mirror in which I saw reflected the woman I wanted to become. He didn’t tell me what to do or think, nothing as crass as that. He just made it easy to like what he liked. Adam led me to discover places in myself I’d never known. I didn’t know what I wanted to study; he was already beginning his graduate work in English literature. He was a devout agnostic and I still went to Sunday mass. He liked the Sex Pistols and I listened to Top 40 radio. There were five years between us, which at the time seemed like an eternity. He was more mature than the boys in my dorm. He had his own apartment, a car, a job. Adam thought and fought with passion burning bright. He was vibrant and alive in a way I envied, admired and coveted. He smoked. He drank. He rode a motorcycle fast on dark roads and had insane hobbies like bungee jumping.

He was brilliant and wild, my Lord Byron, whom Lady Caroline Lamb had called “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”

While playing the part of the brainiac, my sexual experience had been limited to one high school boyfriend who’d been a fan of receiving but not giving oral sex. I’d held onto my virginity more by circumstance than determination. Most of my friends had already taken the plunge into “womanhood,” few with stories compelling enough to make me want to consider it myself. I’d dated a few boys but never tumbled head over heels into the crazy tempestuousness of adolescence so many of my friends had undergone. It might have been better if I had. A sort of training. As it was, I’d never felt the depths of emotion that sent me soaring and plummeting within minutes of each other.

Until I met Adam.

I told nobody of this internal roller coaster. Not Donna, who’d become my best friend. Not my sister Katie, who, two years younger than I, had her high school dramas to keep her busy. I kept the secret of my love inside and turned it over and over constantly, seeking a way to either break it up or figure it out. Like a Rubik’s Cube, or one of those pictures with the hidden images not everyone can see. I’d never been so confused, despairing, desperate and so elated and infused with joy.

I was in love with Adam Danning, and I had no idea of how he felt about me.

I should’ve been ashamed of asking Rachael to give me some of the condoms she was so proud of displaying when I knew I meant to use them to seduce her boyfriend. But when you’re mad, bad and dangerously in love, many things seem excusable that normally wouldn’t.

My first semester had passed unbearably fast. Faced with a month of distance in which Adam would be spending his time with Rachael, I could wait no longer. The day before I was supposed to go home, I armed myself with brand-new panties and the handful of condoms, and I went to Adam’s apartment under the pretense of dropping off the gift I’d bought for him.

He opened the door, shirtless, hair wet from a shower. My throat clutched. Every nerve thrummed. My heart beat in my wrists, the hollow of my throat. Between my legs.

“You got me a present?” He seemed pleased and took the package, which I’d been careful to wrap in nondenominational paper. “Sadie, wow. What is it?”

“Open it.”

Standing in his living room, my knees shaking and my palms sweating, I felt I’d reached a precipice. I wasn’t one for leaping, but I was ready to jump, no parachute necessary and no bungee cord, either. I was going to leap, and I was going to fly.

Adam hefted the volume in both his hands, his grin all the thanks I needed. “e.e. cummings, the Complete Poems.”

“You don’t have it, do you?”

He shook his head and leafed through the pages with the reverence every true book lover has when touching a new volume for the first time.

I’d marked one page with a ribbon of scarlet silk, and as I watched his fingers turning page after page on the way to revealing it, I forgot to breathe. I waited, each moment like drops of honey dripped from a spoon, every one its own universe but tied to all the rest by the thin strands of time.

He stopped when he found the ribbon, and his eyes scanned the words on the page, top to bottom, before he looked up to me. I remembered to breathe, sipping oxygen like wine. My pulse pounded in my ears, similar to the rush and crush of waves.

“Any illimitable star,” he said, and I knew at once I hadn’t made a mistake.

Adam put the book aside. We stared at each other without words but needing none. He held out a hand, and I took it. Our fingers linked, his hand warm and mine cold.

He pulled me onto his lap, straddling him. His shoulders beneath my palms were warm, his skin smooth. My groin snugged up against his bare stomach, and his hands fit naturally on my hips, as if they’d always meant to be there.

We kissed for a long time, sitting that way. His hands moved up and down my body. His erection nudged my rear until we shifted and it pressed up between us. I explored the lines and curves of his body every place I could reach without leaving his mouth or his lap. I traced the lines of his ribs, the bulges of his biceps. I circled the twin round spots of his nipples and counted the bumps of his spine with my fingertips.

By the time we moved toward the bedroom, I was wetter than I’d ever been. My nipples were taut and aching. Sensation crackled along my nerves like Independence Day sparklers, and everything had gone slow and languid, petroleum jelly smeared on the camera lens. Soft and out of focus.

Adam pushed aside the covers on his rumpled bed to lay me down on sheets that smelled of him, his mouth never leaving mine. We stretched out, my legs opening to cradle him against my body. His lips left mine to find the sensitive places on my jaw and throat, then lower as he unbuttoned my blouse to reveal my breasts in my new black lace bra.

He unwrapped me like a package, with slow fingers and low murmurs of appreciation. His hands passed over my skin as he unhooked, unbuttoned, unzipped. When I was naked, he bent to kiss my mouth again and his body aligned with mine, a puzzle with only two pieces. Adam and me. Fitting.

He traced my body with his lips and tongue. I tensed when he nuzzled the curve of my belly, then my thighs. He parted my curls with a fingertip and kissed my clit. When he licked it, I arched into ecstasy at once, giving myself up to his touch. Adam made love to me with his mouth, slowly, until I couldn’t do anything but ride the waves of pleasure and try to remember to breathe.

Adam didn’t fumble with the condom or struggle to figure out how to enter me. He used a hand to guide himself inside, dipping the head of his penis first to smooth the way for the rest. I was so wet he was able to fill me with one thrust.

We both cried out. He bent over me, his face buried in the curve of my shoulder. His teeth grazed me, and I answered with the scrape of my nails on his back. We didn’t move at first. Pleasure had immobilized us. The immensity of what we were doing became real. Only for a moment, and then he eased out with a smooth shift of his hips. Back in, all the way, and I lifted my hips to meet him.

Inexperience should have made me clumsy, but arousal choreographed us. In and out, bodies shifting. Give and take.

It didn’t last long enough for me to come again, a feat of which I didn’t know myself capable at the time. Adam cried my name when he came. His last thrust hurt me more than the first had and I cried out, too.

After, I lay curled in the circle of his arms and slept until it was time for me to get up and leave for home. It took my body three days to recover, until I could no longer feel the effects of him inside me, and by that time Adam had called me twice a day and made arrangements to come see me at my parents’ house. I never asked him what he told Rachael. I didn’t really care.

We were inseparable after that. We got married the June after I earned my masters in psychology. A year later, while I was working on my post-doctoral experience so I could sit for the licensing exam, the binding on Adam’s left ski broke as a result of a manufacturer’s defect. He skied headfirst into a tree, suffered a C5-level spinal cord injury that put him in a coma for three weeks and left him without sensation or voluntary movement from the shoulders down. He was only thirty-six.

Losing my virginity hadn’t made me a woman, but almost losing my husband had. He could have died. There are days I weep with gratitude that he didn’t.

And then, there are days I wish he had.

At home that night, I let myself in the front door with my key. I smelled something good, savory. Probably soup. Mrs. Lapp likes to make soup in the winter.

“Mrs. D?”

She always asks, though who else would be coming in at dinner time? “It’s me.”

She bustled out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. Her tidy gray bun had gone a little askew and wisps of hair had come down around her flushed face. Dolly Lapp cooks and cleans like a dream come true, but she’s more than a housekeeper. She’s a mother, nurse, friend and my life would be impossible without her.

I hung my coat on the hook and set my briefcase in its accustomed spot by the front door. Everything had to stay in its place in my house. There could be no room for clutter, nothing to snag or catch on wheels and block the way.

“I made soup. Come in and have a seat. I was getting worried. You’re so much later than usual.”

“Traffic was bad.” I lied with nary a flinch. Traffic had been fine. The fight with Joe had so unsettled me I’d gone driving, around and around, unable to face the idea of coming home. “But you’re right, it’s late. I should go check on Adam.”

Mrs. Lapp nodded her apple-doll head. “He’s in bed already, I helped him in about an hour ago. Soup’s in the Crock-Pot, Mrs. D, and I’ll just get going. Samuel’s been here since half past five. I set him up in the kitchen with a mug of coffee and the newspaper, but you know how he gets rutchy, setting too long.”

Guilt at my selfishness pricked me. “You go on ahead. I’m sorry you had to wait.”

She fluttered her hands. “Pshaw. Not to worry. Just remember to turn it to low when you’re done, so’s it don’t boil down, and I’ll put it away in the morning. Oh, and your sister called. I wrote down her message by the phone.”

She really took excellent care of us. I smiled. “Thanks, Mrs. Lapp.”

She nodded and headed back the hall toward the kitchen and her impatient husband. Belly empty and growling, I postponed my dinner for another few minutes. I climbed the narrow stairs, a hand on the carved and polished railing Mrs. Lapp kept so clean.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped to listen. To my right was the short part of the hall, with the bathroom, the guest room, the elevator and the stairs to the third floor. To my left, the long part of the hall, with two more rooms, the entrance to the back stairs and the master bedroom and bath. From upstairs I heard the faint sound of the television and then the creak of footfalls. Dennis. A moment later he peered over the railing.

I liked Dennis. At six-foot-two-inches and 230 pounds, he looked like a linebacker, but he was equally sensitive as he was strong. Though he’d only been with us for two years, I could no more do without him than I could with Mrs. Lapp.

“Hi, Sadie. You’re home late.”

“Traffic,” I told him, too.

“I’ll be going out in about twenty minutes. I’ll check on him before I go,” he told me and disappeared into his room again. I heard him talking, then making some calls.

Everything has its price, and the cost of having Dennis and Mrs. Lapp was my privacy. No matter how often I wistfully remembered being able to walk around in my underwear and eat peanut butter straight from the jar, that life was a part of the past. My mother-in-law euphemistically called them “help.” I called them necessity. The three of us worked together like synchronized machinery to keep this household functioning. Without them, I’d have been lost.

I paused in Adam’s doorway to put on the right face. A pleased half-smile with just the right touch of weariness to indicate the battles of the highway. A fond gaze.