Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

He sits looking at her, chewing.

“You don’t like it?” he says.

“No, I like it,” she says.

He looks down at his plate. He cuts off a piece, spears it on the knifepoint, holds it out to her. She looks at it.

“Aw,” he says, “come on.”

“No,” Turtle says, “I’m not hungry.”

“Oh come on, you’re hungry.”

“I’m fine,” Turtle says.

“She’ll be okay. It was hardly anything. A scratch off the tip.”

“Fuck.”

“Nah, don’t sweat it. It’s just the very tip.”

“Fuck.”

“Eat your steak.”

“I feel sick,” Turtle says.

“No you don’t,” he says.

She opens her mouth and he puts the knifepoint within the cage of her teeth. She closes her mouth on the blade and looks at him, the knifepoint against her wet tongue, and he draws the blade slowly from her mouth, teeth scraping the steel. She begins to chew, looking at him.

“I don’t understand it,” he says. He picks up the bent coin between thumb and forefinger, holds it framed as Cayenne had. With pointer finger, he indicates the black pockmark. He says, “You hit the coin. I knew you would hit it, and you did. I just don’t understand what happened. Just—just one of those things.”

Turtle watches him in silence.

He turns the coin over in his hand, shaking his head. “Just one of those things,” he says at last.

After dinner, she goes up to her room and curls into her roll of blankets. The girl is downstairs, lying on her sleeping bag in front of the fireplace, her finger wrapped in gauze. How this house must seem to her. Turtle listens to Martin pace from room to room, and sometime in the early morning, he climbs the stairs and opens her door.

“Come take a walk with me,” he says.

She lies there quietly.

“I know you’re not asleep,” he says.

She sits up and he says, “Just the same old kibble.”

She pulls on her fatigues and she is acutely aware of him, slipping her pale white thighs down into the legs of the fatigues and hitching them up over her hips. He leans in the door, expressionless, his eyes hidden in the dark. They walk together down the stairs and past where Cayenne is lying in her sleeping bag in front of the fireplace, holding her injured hand to her chest as if it were a bird. They go out through the sliding glass door and off the porch and down into the fields, wet with dew. He seems in the grip of some wordless awe. As they walk, the grass wets their pants to the hip. They come to the doors that stand open and ajar in the middle of the field, without structure, three of them broken open, four of them intact, forming a rough circle. Martin walks to a doorpost, leans against it, swings the door on its rusted hinges. They look back up the hill to the house, impressive and gloomy, the white clapboard besieged by roses and poison oak. Turtle can see her own window, the rose canes risen up about the frame and reaching inside. She can see the great picture windows of the master bedroom. Out west of them, the ocean buckles and heaves. She looks up to Martin, and he leans against the door, toying with the knob, looking away into the middle distance.

“How is she?” Turtle says.

“She’s all right,” Martin says. “She’ll be okay, give her a couple of days. She’s not like you were. Christ. You could chew on nails.”

Turtle walks into the middle of the circle, stands on all sides surrounded by the doors. Martin toys with the antique glass knob, swings the door open and then closed, engages the deadlock. This silence goes on for a long time. The wind sweeps across them and the culms wend together among themselves in quiet, lonely congregation, and down on the beach the breakers fold onto the cobbles, and Turtle, her hair stirring, looks toward her father.

He says, “Well, fuck.”

Turtle thinks, he left and you had time to gather the pieces of yourself, and you did some of it, you did enough of it. You have a choice now, and don’t tell yourself that you don’t. You may never get that moment again and there may not be very many such moments in your life, but you could do it now. You maybe did not get very long, maybe not so many nights alone as you could wish, but it was all you needed and now you have a choice. Walk away, Turtle. Just walk away from him, and if he follows after and if he will not let you go, you kill him. He’s given you everything and all you need to do is walk away. Do you remember when blood ran in your veins like cool, clear water? You could find that place again and it would be hard but it would be good. Nothing and no one can keep you away from it; only you can take yourself back into the dark, only you can do that. He can’t do it to you, and don’t lie about that. So walk away, Turtle. Think about your soul, and walk away.

He strides over to her and hits her hard in the jaw and she reels back in a plume of blood and her overwhelming feeling is one of relief. He grabs her by her hair and hauls her up and swings her into the closed door and she grabs the doorpost with one hand and the knob with the other, holding on to it for purchase, her face pressed into the beam as he yards her pants down, and she thinks, oh thank fucking god, and he pulls her fatigues down around her thighs and, unbuckling his jeans, there is a moment where she waits on him, clinging to the doorpost, her pants tangled around her thighs and her cunt bare to him and he stands behind her, his hot breath on her neck, and she turns to look at him over her shoulder, eyes so narrowed that his face is shadowed by the tusks of her lashes, looking at him with love, real love, and Martin, with his fist knotted in her hair, drives her forward into the door, the grain of the wood laying weals against her cheek.

She feels in his movement something straining, something reaching too much, his fingers raking at her hair, clutching and rending. His face is fixed in concentration as if he is trying to direct his attention through her to some principle beyond her, grinding her against the closed door in desperation, every movement a continuous, repetitive contempt. He would annihilate her if he could. He pulls at her arms, her hair, as if he wants to pull her apart, repeating over and over, “You bitch, you cunt,” and something about the words is meaningless and chantlike. Turtle turns her face into the wood, closing her eyes, her hand between her legs, grinning with the pain, two fingers framing his cock, his ballsack contracted into a wrinkled lime against her fingers, and Turtle seeming larger than herself, outside herself, willing to die at that moment, willing to be undone, feeling his hatred of her, a straining unendurable compulsion, and Turtle surrendering to it, opening to it, her every thought seizing and black. He bucks and spasms, he clutches at the back of her head, at her shoulder, sinking his fingers in deep, and Turtle closes her eyes, her whole body clenched up. She turns her face away from the door, plants it in her own biceps, and cries out, hair plastered to her cheeks. Martin steps away from her and his spunk runs out of her and down her leg and she catches some of it in her cupped hand and straightens, staggers with her fatigues still knotted around her thighs, and hitches them half up, still unbuckled but around her hips now, flapping open, and she turns to look at him. He is stooped, breathing hard, his eyes open as if in astonishment at what has happened. Turtle is cold and resolved, her flesh stripped of warmth, her very heart inside her cool and wild and unconquerable. Martin drags out the gun and puts it beneath her chin, his breath ragged and steaming through his open jaws.

He says, “This could be it. Just you and me, and then, nothing—nothing—” It’s as if he cannot fasten on her eyes; he looks past her and then at her mouth and he does not meet her stare. He runs his tongue across his lips, some unconscious gesture of pain or relish, and then he flashes her a grimace, showing her all of his teeth, his lips pulled back.