“Yeah, I was with him earlier. He’s quite drunk.”

“Did you know he has a suite here on the eighth floor?”

“Really? That must be nice.”

He knows, thought Ivy, staring at Gideon’s carefully blank expression. He knows and he doesn’t want me to tell him. “Come here.” She pushed Gideon into one of the stalls and closed the door behind her. He was more confused than stunned; then, grasping what she wanted from him, his face went slack. He took her hands and pressed them to his lips. But she didn’t want tenderness. She broke away and slithered down to hip level, pulled down his pants, and took him into her mouth. She was extra rough, both aroused and sickened by the cool, spongy tissue of him hardening, pressing against her tongue. The hands encircling her head were warm and snug, it felt like a crown. A minute later, she came back up and guided him into her, one leg over his hip, her back pressed against the stall. They moved as one, in gentle motions, then, her violence building, she stepped her other foot onto the edge of the toilet seat. He slipped out. She tried again but as they struggled, Gideon banged his elbow on the wall and made a soft cry. “Get a room, gross,” a woman said from the next stall. Gideon froze. His face paled, his mouth closed in shame. Ivy looked upon her fiancé as if from very far away. His humiliation seemed sad to her. She was sad that he was humiliated and sad that she’d been the one to bring it upon him.

Without speaking, he pulled up his pants. She unbunched her dress. Like thieves making their separate getaways, they snuck back out to the party to blend into the anonymous crowd.

18

“WHY’D YOU GO LAST NIGHT?”

“I was invited.”

“By whom?”

“The mayor himself. A gold-plated invitation delivered on a dinner tray. Want to see it?”

“That’s not why you went.”

Roux splayed his hands out in front as if to say, You got me. “You’re right. I wanted to see you in your natural habitat. The slutty dress. Dancing on the table. Salivating over the abundance of rich men. Throw a lasso and you’ll catch one. Did they stuff tips into your underwear?… Oh, wait. You weren’t wearing any.” He was smirking but his eyes were cruel and not one bit amused.

“It’s called a platform,” said Ivy.

“What?”

“I wasn’t dancing on a table.”

Roux laughed in disbelief. “Was Gideon even there?”

“Yes.”

“What a pathetic man.”

“You’re green with jealousy,” Ivy said pleasantly, “and it makes you look like a filthy, green kangaroo.”

“Don’t call me that.”

She deliberately took her time lighting a cigarette, blowing the smoke right into his eyes. “Why not?” she said. “That’s all you are with your dirty money and gold-plated invitations from the mayor of crime town. A filthy green kangaroo.”

He slapped her. A great big thwack on her left cheek. Ivy’s head snapped to the side. She was conscious of the cigarette falling out of her hand and rolling onto the pillow. Her hand drifted to her cheek. The skin was warm and sticky, the pain nonexistent at first, then ferocious.

She launched herself at him, arms raised, going for the hair. She fought like an animal, eyes pinched shut, swinging blindly, silent except for the staggered breathing emitting from her nostrils. Roux wrenched her hands away, pinned them to her sides. She tried to bite his arm. He pushed her facedown onto the bed. Her legs thrashed around but only kicked air. “Enough!” he shouted.

When he realized she wasn’t struggling anymore, he slowly released her. Oxygen returned to her lungs in embarrassing wheezes. She told herself to move, to react, but she couldn’t move a muscle. Over the thump of her galloping heart, she heard the ticking of the clock in the living room.

Roux shoved his face into her line of sight. “Are you okay?”

“Get away from me.”

“Look,” he said aggressively, showing her his profile. “I’m bleeding.” He was. She saw the gashes down his cheek in two parallel curves, like red ski tracks, which he was cupping with one hand to keep the blood from dripping onto the sheets.

He reached for her hand but stopped when she flinched. “I’ll get you some ice,” he said flatly, disappearing to the kitchen.

She heard him rummaging around the refrigerator, opening and closing cabinets. What just happened, she wondered. Was there a manual for how to react when your lover slaps you? What would Sylvia do?

She lay there for a minute before morbid curiosity made her walk out to inspect herself in the entryway mirror. The left side of her face was blotchy pink with mascara and lipstick smeared all over. She tried to comb her hair with her fingers but found that her fingers were too stiff. She looked like a ravished woman. Or a ravaged woman. It was basically the same thing.

Roux came back with an ice pack. He had wiped off his blood but the scratches and dime-sized chunk of scalp, where the hair was missing, looked white and lumpy, like tofu, and spotted with smeared blood. Their eyes met in the mirror; both paused for a second, taking in this wanton portrait. The unsentimental gray eyes, in tune with her every movement, seemed to say she’d deserved it, that he wasn’t sorry, that he could do it again, and maybe worse.

Sylvia would be cold and indifferent, Ivy decided, recalling the mechanical way Gideon’s sister’s expression had straightened after Roux had dumped her in front of her entire family. Maybe Roux, not Sylvia, as she’d assumed, had been the source of their volatility. Roux, who had had no father growing up and could only resort to sordid violence.

Ivy walked into the living room. Roux followed.

“Want to watch a movie?” he asked, seeing her look toward the television screen. She’d only been trying to see her own reflection.

“All right.”

Roux dimmed the lights. It was a French movie they’d already seen, about a high school girl who falls into prostitution out of boredom and ends up accidentally killing her seventy-year-old client during sex. Halfway through the film, Roux reached his hand underneath her shirt and cupped her breast. They had sex on the sofa, swift, urgent, without preamble. The flames from the gas fireplace flickered over his naked body, illuminating the marble-white skin, the powerful chest, the body that was so much larger than her own. Bone for bone, flesh for flesh, he could crush her if he wanted. He could beat her senseless, suffocate her with his pillow, bash her skull against the wall, he had the power to do all this and she wouldn’t have the strength to stop him. He grabbed her leg and hitched it over his waist. They tumbled onto the floor. I love you, he whispered, piercing her neck with his teeth. She dug her nails into his fleshy thighs, slick with sweat, until he groaned with pain and pleasure. When they finished, he rolled away and they lay side by side on the ground, several feet apart, panting up at the ceiling. The movie’s theme song began playing in the background. Ivy caught the last scene—the lithe French virginal heroine who was a prostitute lying in bed with her dead lover beside her, smoking a cigarette, as the police cars pulled up in front of her house—before the screen faded to black. She and Roux often watched foreign films like these. The unfamiliar language, the characters’ detachment, the portrayal of sex as a clinical act—all of it depressed her, yet she also found the films comforting in some ways. They portrayed, more or less, her own reality.

* * *

AFTER ONE OF her mother’s beatings, Ivy could, at least, count on being left alone for a few days. If the beating was particularly vicious, Nan might even cook Ivy’s favorite dishes and allow her to watch television before starting her homework. Nan neither justified nor apologized. Roux’s guilt, on the other hand, made him truculent. He wanted Ivy to know exactly why he’d behaved thus, why he’d hit her, why he was driven crazy by her—it was all because he loved her. He’d told her so in the heat of their lovemaking, which, like anything said during sex, didn’t count. But admitting it seemed to have unlocked some previously untapped source of male possessiveness. He had never before wooed her, never tried to be her boyfriend, but now his romantic gestures were unrelenting.