Work Text:
Then begins
the terrible charity of marriage,
husband and wife
climbing the green hill in gold light
until there is no hill,
only a flat plain stopped by the sky.
Here is my hand, he said.
but that was long ago.
Here is my hand that will not harm you.
The ember glow and the taste of smoke; the heady rush and the bitter burn; the balance of something that hurts and something that feels so good. Celeste has a passion for the occasional cigarette. Celeste desires balance, like the headache that comes with descending from a flight at thirty thousand feet.
She’s also sure that everything is like this, in the end.
You are so beautiful, says Perry. Madeline says it too, and Celeste turns it back on both of them, pretending that they mean the same thing.
Thank you, she says. I love you, stop, stop.
There are certain rooms in her house that make her throat close up. The spacious closet, with row upon row of shoes, Louboutins and Blahniks, awaiting her in yellow light. All that beauty, and the worst has not even happened here—except when it has—but she cannot bear to be surrounded by all this proof of wealth.
Quiet. Waiting. No miles walked in those shoes: no hope of doing so. She spins around and around between them thinking,
Thank you. I love you.
Stop.
The patio is better. (Perry choked her on the patio.) The patio has the benefit of fresh air, and everything else from the boys crunching their cereal to a few midnight thrills. When Perry is good to her at night she can really believe in his love for her. The moon’s light only shows so many secrets; to love someone in the dark means it’s not for anyone else to see. It's for its own sake.
How much realer could a moment be? Real enough to set the future in something as sure as stone, but kinder?
Celeste used to be someone else. In law school, she never had trouble with men. They asked her out and she turned them down. She cared so much about her career, even then, and she didn’t meet Perry until five years later, when she was already teetering on the edge of a big decision, tired of her law firm job. She missed her family. She wanted out from under the crushing weight of too much ambition.
He seemed like the answer to everything.
Sometimes he still does.
Marriage should be forever, and more than that, it should be enough. Celeste smokes and drinks and moves lightly, the pain in her ribs a secret, the bruises on her soft underarms a secret. It should be enough to be ruined and loved by the same man: enough to make her sure of staying with him.
She turns round and round in the rooms where he’s crushed her, and she thinks she might just be losing her mind.
The boys don’t know. She tells herself that like she told it to the therapist. She stared, outraged, into the ordinary face and all-seeing eyes of the woman who was supposed to strengthen her love, not undermine it, and she meant the words with every beat of her heart.
The boys don’t know, and Perry would never hurt them.
Perry used to promise that he would never hurt her.