Nicola Griffith - Stay

“So you learned a lot. Was this in Naples?” Beneath the burning logs the coals were beginning to glow, and I was hungry.

“Some. We were there—I was there—six weeks; he’d been there a few weeks before me. Then we went to New York.”

“And you stayed in his loft in SoHo.”

She wrapped her arms around her and nodded. I waited. Her gaze stayed internal.

“How about another beer?”

She nodded again. I brought two back, put one on the grass beside her, and settled down again. “So, you moved to SoHo.”

In what seemed like an irrelevant aside, she asked, “Did you know that half the grocery stores in the country have these tiny cameras inside their frozen food cases, or even inside cans of peas sitting on a high shelf? It’s illegal to have video surveillance of changing rooms, but they’re wired for audio. Half the mirrors in a department store have cameras behind them—and hundreds on the ceilings. Geordie’s apartment was like that, except I didn’t find out until later.”

Cameras. I hadn’t thought of that.

“Man, I loved that loft: so urban and cool. Those halogen lights, high ceiling, bare beams, antiques in the bedroom. An elevator right from the street! And Geordie took me with him to his first job on Fifth Avenue, told everyone I was his associate, even consulted me on where to set up our cameras—though even then I knew it was more his way of teaching me than real consultation. Jesus, the things I learned. Unbelievable. And it was all real.”

“But other things weren’t.” I didn’t like the idea that I might be on tape.

“No. Only Geordie kept my mind on other things so it was hard to tell. He flattered me, he treated me like a peer. He was kind. He… the sex was great, exciting—he was generous there, too. It was great, everything was perfect.” She had begun to circle; we were coming to it. “He talked a lot. Sometimes it was hard to tell when he was joking. He talked about all his cameras and his charts and statistics and how he could train anyone to be his slave if he wanted. As long as they were young enough when he started. A woman my age was too old to train, he said, it would be easier to break me than train me. But he talked as well about training shoppers so they were like lemmings, and he’d laugh—I would, too—and it would be a joke, so I thought it was all a joke. Life was one huge joke, a big party, and I was the guest of honor, and I deserved it.”

“But then something happened.”

“Yes. He… the first time, it…” She took a swallow of beer, then a deep breath. “We were having sex. I was on top. He suddenly said, Stop, and his voice was all cold, so I stopped, and he pushed me off and got off the bed, and I thought maybe he was ill—was going to the bathroom or something—but then he suddenly grabbed me from behind, shoved me on my face, and got on top of me, and I could feel that he wanted me up my ass, so I said, No, stop, wait, let’s get some lube, but he just… he didn’t, he wouldn’t, he just fucked me anyway, and it hurt, and I yelled, but he kept on and on until he came, and then he laughed and climbed off.”

“Why didn’t you hit him?”

“Hit him?” She looked as though she had no idea what I was talking about.

We stared at each other: the alien across the fire.

“Anyhow, I cried. And when he saw I was crying, he smiled, but then his face fell and he said, Sorry, sorry, oh god, sorry, I forgot, and the change was so quick I thought maybe I’d imagined it, especially when he started crying, too. He stroked my hair, he just kept saying sorry. Then he brought me some tissues, and he held me, and he said that his last girlfriend—he’d talked about her before, they’d been together about a year—had liked that, liked being fucked up the ass and taken by force, pretending to say no, and he’d just been confused. And then he ran me a bath, and washed me—he was sweet—and said sorry again, and made me cocoa. And the next day he took me out for a great dinner at Le Cirque, and gave me a diamond bracelet.”

The clearing was silent but for the hiss and pop of the fire. “And the second time, what did he give you for that?”

“Stock. But that makes it sound so easy, so simple. It wasn’t.”

I waited, but she didn’t seem to want to say any more. I drank some beer, savored its bite. “Did you know,” I said, “that fizz isn’t just the feeling of bubbles of carbon dioxide bursting on your tongue, it’s mostly a chemical reaction detected by your taste buds?”

She took a sip. “It feels like bubbles.”

We both silently contemplated the enzymatic breakdown of carbon dioxide to carbonic acid. After a while, I sighed. “Finish the story, Tammy. You may as well just get it all out.”

After a long moment she bowed her head, and began again.

The second time, she said, was not until after she had finally come to believe that she had been wrong about that cruel smile, that it had just been a mistake, a slip akin to crying out an ex-lover’s name just as your muscles begin to squeeze and shudder. Geordie was letting her analyze his data on the shopping traffic at the boutique he was consulting for, and was paying her well for it. Their sex was good, and everything else, especially for a southern girl who had spent most of her adult life in Atlanta. They went to MoMA, and off-Broadway plays, to a New York premiere of some film directed by a colleague’s brother. She’d been out to lunch at one of the galleries, then bought a few things at Saks, then come back to the loft to find Geordie on the phone. She’d put her shopping down near the elevator door, tiptoed up behind him, and kissed him on the back of the neck. He turned and punched her in the stomach.

“He didn’t hesitate, he didn’t change expression, he didn’t even check to see where I’d landed, just kept talking. Didn’t miss a beat. I lay half on and half off the rug, thinking, Oh, I have a run in my hose, and trying to figure out why I couldn’t get my breath, and he just kept talking. And when he put the phone down, he smiled and said, Hi honey, what are you doing down there? It was so… so confusing, and he seemed so concerned, that I couldn’t put it together. His reality and mine.”

When she’d got her breath back, she told him he’d hit her—but she was hesitant about it—and he said, Oh, I must have caught you in the stomach with my elbow—you should never sneak up on me that way, honey—I’m really sorry I hurt you. And a portfolio of biotech stock appeared in her name the next day. She was bewildered: was it possible he really believed he hadn’t punched her? Had he? Was she mistaken?

He started to talk about her joining him in business partnership in a few months, about her bringing her things from Atlanta. Their sex became more adventurous; lots of fantasy role-play. Their schedule—all in the analysis stage, now, and done in the loft—was hectic, and sometimes they didn’t sleep for thirty hours at a time, and even when they did sleep it was at odd times of the day; their meals were ordered in, and erratic.

“I didn’t know, sometimes, what time of day or night it was, or even what day of the week. There’s no windows in that place, except the bedroom, and he’s got those covered in this slippery gray plastic stuff. The outside world started to feel weird. My watch had disappeared that first week, so I only ever knew what time it was when I asked Geordie, and sometimes what he told me didn’t make any sense. What?”

“Nothing.” I understood, now, what had been so odd about that loft: no clocks. Even the VCR and microwave displays read 88:88. And there had been no radio tuner on the music system, heavy drapes closed in the daytime bedroom, no phones. “Go on.”

“It was surreal. He’d sometimes stop in the middle of talking about foot traffic patterns and shopper penetration zones and say… weird stuff, like ‘Women are lesser beings,’ and he sounded so, I don’t know, so earnest and reasonable, that I just… I ended up agreeing with him.”