Desi is here again. He is here almost every day now, simpering around the house, standing in the kitchen as the setting sun lights up his profile so I can admire it, pulling me by the hand into the tulip room so I can thank him again, reminding me how safe and loved I am.
He says I’m safe and loved even though he won’t let me leave, which doesn’t make me feel safe and loved. He’s left me no car keys. Nor house keys nor the gate security code. I am literally a prisoner – the gate is fifteen feet high, and there are no ladders in the house (I’ve looked). I could, I suppose, drag several pieces of furniture over to the wall, pile them up, and climb over, drop to the other side, limp or crawl away, but that’s not the point. The point is, I am his valued, beloved guest, and a guest should be able to leave when she wants. I brought this up a few days ago. ‘What if I need to leave. Immediately?’
‘Maybe I should move in here,’ he counters. ‘Then I could be here all the time and keep you safe, and if anything happens, we could leave together.’
‘What if your mom gets suspicious and comes up here and you’re found hiding me? It would be awful.’
His mother. I would die if his mother came up here, because she would report me immediately. The woman despises me, all because of that incident back in high school – so long ago, and she still holds a grudge. I scratched up my face and told Desi she attacked me (the woman was so possessive, and so cold to me, she might as well have). They didn’t talk for a month. Clearly, they’ve made up.
‘Jacqueline doesn’t know the code,’ he says. ‘This is my lake house.’ He pauses and pretends to think. ‘I really should move up here. It’s not healthy for you to spend so many hours by yourself.’
But I’m not by myself, not that much. We have a bit of a routine established in just two weeks. It’s a routine mandated by Desi, my posh jailer, my spoiled courtier. Desi arrives just after noon, always smelling of some expensive lunch he’s devoured with Jacqueline at some white-linened restaurant, the kind of restaurant he could take me to if we moved to Greece. (This is the other option he repeatedly presents: We could move to Greece. For some reason, he believes I will never be identified in a tiny little fishing village in Greece where he has summered many times, and where I know he pictures us sipping the wine, making lazy sunset love, our bellies full of octopus.) He smells of lunch as he enters, he wafts it. He must dab goose liver behind his ears (the way his mother always smelled vaguely vaginal – food and sex, the Collings reek of, not a bad strategy).
He enters, and he makes my mouth water. The smell. He brings me something nice to eat, but not as nice as what he’s had: He’s thinning me up, he always preferred his women waify. So he brings me lovely green star fruit and spiky artichokes and spiny crab, anything that takes elaborate preparation and yields little in return. I am almost my normal weight again, and my hair is growing out. I wear it back in a headband he brought me, and I have colored it back to my blond, thanks to hair dye he also brought me: ‘I think you will feel better about yourself when you start looking more like yourself, sweetheart,’ he says. Yes, it’s all about my well-being, not the fact that he wants me to look exactly like I did before. Amy circa 1987.
I eat lunch as he hovers near me, waiting for the compliments. (To never have to say those words – thank you – again. I don’t remember Nick ever pausing to allow me – force me – to thank him.) I finish lunch, and he tidies up as best as he knows how. We are two people unaccustomed to cleaning up after ourselves; the place is beginning to look lived in – strange stains on countertops, dust on windowsills.
Lunch concluded, Desi fiddles with me for a while: my hair, my skin, my clothes, my mind.
‘Look at you,’ he’ll say, tucking my hair behind my ears the way he likes it, unbuttoning my shirt one notch and loosening it at the neck so he can look at the hollow of my clavicle. He puts a finger in the little indentation, filling the gap. It is obscene. ‘How can Nick have hurt you, have not loved you, have cheated on you?’ He continually hits these points, verbally poking a bruise. ‘Wouldn’t it be so lovely to just forget about Nick, those awful five years, and move on? You have that chance, you know, to completely start over with the right man. How many people can say that?’
I do want to start over with the right man, the New Nick. Things are looking bad for him, dire. Only I can save Nick from me. But I am trapped.
‘If you ever left here and I didn’t know where you were, I’d have to go to the police,’ he says. ‘I’d have no choice. I’d need to make sure you were safe, that Nick wasn’t … holding you somewhere against your will. Violating you.’
A threat disguised as concern.
I look at Desi with outright disgust now. Sometimes I feel my skin must be hot with repulsion and with the effort to keep that repulsion hidden. I’d forgotten about him. The manipulation, the purring persuasion, the delicate bullying. A man who finds guilt erotic. And if he doesn’t get his way, he’ll pull his little levers and set his punishment in motion. At least Nick was man enough to go stick his dick in something. Desi will push and push with his waxy, tapered fingers until I give him what he wants.
I thought I could control Desi, but I can’t. I feel like something very bad is going to happen.