LITMIR.BIZ

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fossicking, bedlamite, shambles, oblate, coruscating, shambolic, furbelowed, aperçu—this silent recitation, word after word, a beseeching, a cry for remembrance, for benevolence, for fairness. One by one, the words clicked through her mind, and then Martin looked up at her and he smiled and Joan saw his smile and felt a rip of fear, her eyes retreating from the beatific look on his face, landing on a corner of the room where she saw they had missed a place, a strip of wood not quite as brightly white as the rest.

      “Joan,” he said, gripping her belly, as if his long surgeon fingers might cradle the infinitesimal and unwanted that her body was harboring. There was a gauzy shimmer across his brown eyes. She had never seen him shed a tear, not even at his father’s funeral, but the threat was there now, and another favorite word passed through her mind, trembling, because there were trembling teardrops poised behind Martin’s long lashes, ready to fall, and this time she could not look away, could only stare back at him as her body tightened, turned rigid, her heart all at once shocked into pounding, white noise filling her ears, her mind still reciting words—chaotic, barbate, insufflation, prodrome, otiose, misprision—but still she heard him say, “I’ve never been so happy.”

      She watched him rise from the floor. He was speaking again. “We’ve got to celebrate. I’ll go out and get some champagne and something sparkling and nonalcoholic for you.”

      And then he was out of her study, his tread heavy on the maple floors as he walked through the rest of their small house, the rattle of his keys as he plucked them from the bowl on the shelf next to the back door, the door slamming, his old Toyota revving up.

      The shock did not relax its grip on her. She stood rooted to the white wooden floor, stunned that Martin did not remember their pact, the oath he took twice that snowy day not six months before, that his instinct was not hers, to do away with it completely, right from the start. A quick operation, she barely anaesthetized, her womb left clean and uninhabited, barer even than the bare rooms in this new house of theirs.

      She thought of the story in Other Small Spaces that had become a revolutionary call among a small contingent of Joan’s most fervent female fans, the opening paragraphs flowing right through her:

       It felt right to Elizabeth that her hand should be freed of that finger with the rings that pronounced her his property. The stump had stopped bleeding, but there was so much more blood than she expected, a spreading pool across the new kitchen floor, just beginning to stagnate.

       Surely her blood would stain the white tiles, the white grout, but perhaps that was as it should be, an indelible reminder of her suffering. She bent to stare into the bloody pool, surprised at its deep hue, a rich, heavy burgundy, like the wines Stuart preferred, not the happy red that pebbled her fingertips from a paper cut at the office or a paring knife nick when she chopped vegetables for dinner. She wondered how difficult it would be to clean and nearly opened the cabinet for the cleaning stuff, but what was the rush, she wondered. She would leave it for another day.

       She stood up and felt her bones knitting back into place, as they never had to do before he took to pummeling her. On the new kitchen counter, called Centaur Granite, lay the offending digit. It was rosy when she first cut it off, but it was paler now, a fine sort of blue. Like a work of art, really, a sculpture on a pedestal in a cool downtown gallery, with a placard beneath it that would read Drained of Life.

       But the finger glittered because of the engagement ring she had been so excited to own, to wear, a rare and perfect four-carat diamond that sparkled in the sun and had no inclusions, no spots, no clouds, no cavities, nothing to disfigure the view, the opposite of her own pocked eyesight when she had looked at Stuart’s smooth exterior, that handsome face, and said, “Yes, Stuart, I say yes,” having no idea of the violence he could not contain. And nestled next to the diamond ring, curled up tight around it like a sleeping snake, was the golden wedding band that had always been too tight.

       She could not imagine Stuart’s face when he returned and saw the bloody floor, her dead finger on the counter in a position of accusation and blame. How strange all that sawing had not damaged its fine tapered shape, had not chipped the polish on the nail. Even now, the shade was still pretty, a pale pink color called Princess Fairy Tale—

      Joan thought it might not be too late to slip off her own wedding band, tell Martin their young marriage was at an end, that the only conception she was interested in was what she birthed on the page.

      Their house was in a new development, some of the roads still waiting to be paved, the market ten miles away, the wine and liquor store next door. Perhaps there was an hour before Martin returned, and imagining him back in the house, beaming, popping corks, making toasts, set Joan panting, her mouth open like the dog they should have gotten immediately. She felt faint, her vision blurring in the middle, as if her blue irises were turning black, a shade dropping over them. She made it into her chair before her legs gave way, dropped her head between her knees, and waited.

      When her eyesight cleared, and her heart was only galloping, she sat up and looked at the shelves Martin had hung, stocked with copies of her two award-winning, best-selling books, all the different covers, the titles in myriad languages, proof that she had readers around the globe. She looked at the goose-necked lamp they’d found at a yard sale when she joined him in Rhome; at the old battered wooden dining-room table brought from New York, on which she had written her stories; at her solid typewriter atop, an Olivetti Praxis she loved; at the four hundred pages of her first novel she was calling The Sympathetic Executioners. She wished she could unravel time to the moment before she accepted Martin’s offer of a drink in that Annapolis bar.

      She looked down at the narrow wedding band on her finger, the inscription—MM loves JA—hidden underneath, and thought it would be easy enough to place it in Martin’s hand, to separate their belongings, to let him buy the house, or perhaps she would simply give it to him, deed it over as a kind of consolation prize for the end of their marriage. She would return to New York. She had some money now, would not be stuck in the sooty East Village with its pungent streets, its buildings marked with aggressive graffiti. It would take less than a week to pack up and arrange for the movers. While she searched for a new place to live in the city, she could stay with Iger, a senior editor now at Gravida and the new owner of a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. Joan could accomplish everything, she thought, without losing too much time, without being away from the book for too long. Too much was happening in the lives of Silas and Abe, her young killers for hire, the sympathetic executioners, for her to break stride.

      The blare of the ice-cream truck’s tune shattered her hectic silence, the song growing louder as the truck journeyed through the unfinished neighborhood, a man yelling, “Wait, wait! You’ve got two little customers coming!” making Joan think of the lonely, stilted childhoods she and Martin had both endured. His mother dead when both he and she were too young, left with his stern father, ever the navy vice admiral who never wrapped his son in a hug, did not put a warm hand on his head or his shoulder; and Joan’s life, unwanted in her parents’ house, lost and alone unless she was reading or writing her stories up in her bedroom, or tucked away in the town library doing one or the other. How her parents had stared, as if her connection to them, her very existence, was an unsolvable puzzle. She instantly could see her father at the end of his working day, nearly motionless in his chair, the news on the television, a crossword in his lap, a glass of neat bourbon by his side, head turned away from his wife, from Joan’s mother, who stood on the other side of the living room, phone against her well-tended wash-and-set, her lipsticked mouth wide in pretend surprise as she listened to friends’ secrets, to gossip making the rounds. The furtiveness between the people Joan called Mother and Father, when her mother hung up the phone and sashayed over to sit on her father’s lap, a soldered circle of two Joan observed from the fringes, seated at the top of the staircase when she, no matter her age, was done with her reading and writing for the day. How they inclined their heads toward each other in those long minutes in the living room, and later at the kitchen table, telling each other about their days, neither ever asking Joan a question about anything. She remembered those awful dinners of her

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