The Family Man

The short story The Family Man as it originally appeared:

“So you've got the entire financial obligation of a family, without any of the fun?"

He was unable to formulate a response, wholly because of the way Ralph had said the word fun, the short syllable dripping with a myriad of inferences— all of them lurid— all of them pertaining to Preston's sister-in-law, Juliet. The fun, in Ralph's mind, was the payment a man was due for children, for wives, grocery bills, school bills, department store accounts, housing and other costs.

The way he said it, you could imagine he would have demanded some fun from Juliet as his end of the bargain. Not outright, of course. He would be slippery about it, calculating, he would hone his delivery into a cold and ongoing thing. Over time, she would be made aware of just how much she truly owed him; a debt of gratitude to be paid in the most shameful, reductive, pitiful way.

To be clear, Ralph would pity her. He would pity her during the act and still after it, too. He would be disdainful, turning his self-disgust outward onto her. Charity case. Surely if she wasn't forced to come begging to him on her knees, she could still get down on them only for a little while—

Preston felt his jaw twitch, his hands clenched into fists under the table. In that moment he hated Ralph, his inferences, his tightly curled black hair and well-groomed mustache, jumpy, sparkling eyes and the devastatingly off-hand barbs that he delivered so easily that you'd think he practiced before a mirror every night. Now he imagined something much worse: Ralph's lips curling back over his straight, babyish white teeth as he pulled open the front of his trousers, Juliet taking off her clothes and allowing herself to be appraised by his cold blue eyes. Her sweet, delicate body being looked over by him, being touched by him— handled by him. He knew exactly what Ralph would have taken from her in payment.

He pushed his chair back suddenly and stood.

"Come on, now," Ralph was wheedling, imploring, his smile greatly diminished though still lingering. "I didn't mean anything by it. It's just talk, you know—" he motioned between the two of them. "It's the way men talk."

He left anyway. His excuse was that he had to use the toilet and, when he got back, they could work out the rest of the deal. Fine. And when he returned there was a glass of scotch at his place, three fingers, and one at Ralph's too.

“My apologies for the coarseness of my language, dear sir," he said. His tone was so magnanimous, yet also strangely sincere, that he had to accept, sitting down and drinking up. The bottle was uncapped on the table between them; afterwards, Ralph refilled the glasses. The deal was made— it was all business, anyway, and if there was any financial ruin in it for either side it wouldn't come down to either man directly. That was just the way it was done. Now Ralph excused himself, and Preston, left alone at the table, reached into his pocket.

His hand trembled as he lit a cigarette. This phenomenon came and went— it was caused by the same thing that had killed his brother Scott, thirty-three years old when he died. He left behind Juliet and the children and, as Preston was now the only son and sole heir to his family's trust, they became his obligation too. No one had to tell him this, though of course his mother did. His father was long dead by then, so his mother, Juliet, and the two children were the family he had left. It was still a sight more than a lot of people had. More than Scotty.

Preston lived with his mother in a top floor apartment in Bridle Path. The apartment was comprised of the entire floor and the one above it (half-sized and occupied mostly by a glassed-in sunroom) with a private elevator. His mother insisted on calling it a lift. It was far too big for just the pair of them. Juliet and her children lived not far away, near the university in a house that overlooked Queen's Park. It was the one she'd moved to after she married his brother.

Juliet didn't come from the same kind of money. She and Scotty met at university; Juliet was three years younger and perfectly pretty, delicate to the point of near-frailty, with a round face and soft, tender eyes. Preston had almost been moved to tears the first time they met, just from looking at her eyes— they sparked something very intimate, very deeply buried and nearly unidentifiable inside of him. Not sexual attraction, and not desire. Not even romantic love, but something much more insidious, deep-rooted, and yawning. Loneliness.

The more base feelings surfaced when she stood up from her chair and leaned forward at the waist to retrieve a napkin ring that had rolled beneath the edge of a serving dish holding scalloped potatoes. As she did so the collar of her fuzzy pink sweater gaped open, and he saw her breasts, themselves surprisingly large for her thin frame. He was almost as pleased by the sight of them as he was by the unexpected shock he got when she revealed them to him in that way— casually, unintentionally, right there in the presence of his mother and father and his brother. His brother, who most certainly had seen them for himself or, if not only seen them, squeezed them in the palm of his hand.

He spent the rest of the meal feigning distraction, praying his erection would go down before it was time to leave the table for drinks and cigarettes in the drawing room. It did. But later that evening, lying in the bathtub, he resurrected it only to pump at himself furiously, mercilessly, thinking all the while of those white lace-swaddled breasts. He imagined how they'd lay bare over her delicate ribs, the soft pink tips inviting him to bury himself face first and suck.

Back then nearly anything had the capacity to make him hard. He was able, without even trying, to separate those deeply searching eyes from the immaculately-formed body. As he brought himself to climax he imagined himself doing some of the most vile and thrilling things to her, without any remorse. She wasn't her, she was her body. A body which had gifted itself to him in a spontaneous and illicit glimpse.

He imagined walking with her through the park in Forest Hill, imagined that out of nowhere some disgusting criminal delinquent came running up behind them to tear her blouse off. Her undergarments, too. As she stood there, shocked and exposed, he imagined struggling with the sleeves of his own jacket to cover her, comfort her, those pale naked breasts that everyone had now seen pressed into and spreading softly over his chest as he pulled her close. He came.

Back then it was so easy for him not to fall in love. Now, ten years later, everything in his life had flipped on its side to the point that he felt rage at Ralph making a comment which, all told, was far less crude than anything he himself had imagined back then.

But still. She wasn't Ralph's sister-in-law. She was his.

He walked the block over past her house on the way home to his. The lights were on upstairs— the children may still have been awake. Juliet wasn't the type to enforce a strict bedtime. Perhaps she was getting ready for bed herself, dressed in a pretty white gown, lace, floor length, brushing out her hair.

He imagined he was not himself but Ralph, finding an excuse to press his fingers to the back of her flat little waist during some innocuous family gathering— looking on as the children opened their Christmas gifts, perhaps. Imagined him coming up behind her hours later as she stood alone at the kitchen sink rinsing out a glass, breathing his hot liquor breath on her neck as he leaned in and grabbed her breast. No one around. No use putting up a fuss. He was owed.

He was flooded again by anger and disgust, but something else now, too. He shouldn't have drank that scotch. He disgusted himself at times like these and yet, he couldn't help it. He barely even tried.

He saw a girl who lived in the dorms (shameful, shameful— him being thirty-two this year.) He had no doubt that were he to go to her building now and ask the lobby matron to call her down that she would appear, gigglingly and girlishly and appetizing. If there was somewhere to take her, she would surely and enthusiastically make herself available to him, the way she had before— over and over, on the seat of his car, afternoons sprawled on a hotel bed, picnic blankets brought to wooded places and fields outside of the city where it was easy to be alone. Her name was Alice Connor and she was a student of biology, big-breasted with dark red hair. She wanted to marry him. They'd been dating now for over a year, and they had almost been engaged once. His mother said no though, and it was to his relief because, no matter what he'd tried to tell himself, he agreed.

It wasn't anything against Alice. Not from his mother, even— Alice was pretty, and she too had attended Bishop Strachan. The higher education for girls like her was really only a means to show usefulness and resourcefulness as a potential wife. Her father owned a chain of department stores that went all over the province, mostly in the rural areas. Lots of money out on the farms, he said. Her age and looks and background all made her an appropriate match for him.

He was not in love with her. His mother wanted him to marry Juliet. In fact, she said it was his duty to marry Juliet.

Alice was in. She came bounding down to the lobby after a respectable twenty minute interval— it wouldn't have done to look eager and waiting— all bouncing body and shiny dark curls. The sweater she wore was the same fuzzy kind he had just been thinking of, the kind Juliet wore the first time they met, only Alice wore hers skin tight, molded to her figure without an inch of fabric left slack or gaping.

"Hello, Preston, darling," she said, her pink lips stretching into a smile, her freckled nose wrinkling just enough to further weaken his knees. "Can you believe I was just thinking about you? Before you called up, I mean. What are the odds?”

So she had been waiting. Womanly intuition he guessed. He got the first thing he wanted right away, her breasts crushing against him as she hugged him tight. She didn't let up until the matron's voice drifted over to them and, when she did pull back she gave him a knowing look.

"Do you have a coat?" he asked, clearing his throat. "I didn't bring my car. We will have to walk over."

Of course she did. It was a little cropped white rabbit number with bracelet-length sleeves— he had bought it for her. Once outside she grasped his arm, giggling, breasts smashed into his arm, her hand darting out boldly to grab at the front of his pants. "You're hard," she gasped, her voice an intoxicating mixture of excitement and mock-surprise. The scotch continued to course through his veins, his face warm against the cool evening breeze. "Why, Preston Alden! You're a naughty boy!"

So punish me, he thought. Instead he punished her, just a bit, steering her off the sidewalk and against the far side of a large oak tree where he palmed her breasts roughly in both hands and shoved his hard-on into the front of her skirt. He did it until they were both breathless, her hands flat on both his cheeks, lipstick smeared across her face. "Oh," she said. "Oh, you are naughty!"

“I want to fuck you," he said, knowing that his earnest, boyish face and the stripped vulnerability of his voice when he said it would entice, not anger her. The coarseness of his words got her excited, too— he knew that from before. He slid one hand down over her waist to cup her bottom, sinking his fingers in hard. "I want to, right here."

"Fresh," she exclaimed, her eyes widening. When he pushed his hips into her again, she pushed back. There was a second when he thought they might, there in the park— that she might have actually let him— but then she laughed and gave him a mock slap in the face, because she knew by doing so she would inflame him further.

She laughed and bounced her way alongside him back to his apartment building, where he asked for his car to be brought around. They drove over to the Royal York where he kept a suite, and there he was able to unleash his desires on her, and she on him.

Alice was in no way a deep thinker, but she was intuitive in the way that other women weren't, and, in moments like these she was almost entirely uninhibited. She let him suck her breasts as long as he wanted, rubbing his head tenderly before moving on to his penis, until he couldn't stand it anymore and sat up, spilling ejaculate all over her. She did anything he asked, and she wasn't shy about making requests of her own, either. He found her very exciting.

That night, he'd asked her right in the middle of it to slap him again. He wanted it harder this time. He wanted it to sting.

When they first met, and their knowledge of each other was still largely sexually innocent, they had been sitting on a bench in Queen's Park kissing. His hands started to shake and, thinking it was from the cold, she grabbed them both and shoved them inside her coat, each of her hands wrapping his around her breasts. "There," she'd said, smiling triumphantly, her pale skin gone pink over her cheeks and at the tip of her nose. "That ought to warm you up, don't you think?"

He was twenty-eight then, and not inexperienced. He'd been to bed with enough women to immediately recognize and appreciate what he'd found in Alice, a pretty, carefree girl who offered herself to him so easily. It was as though she'd snapped open her purse to give him a stick of gum. He'd had to explain to her later about the shaking, and when he did she got all teary-eyed and tender, pulling his head into her lap and stroking his hair until his erection grew to where it was unavoidable. That was the first time she gave him oral sex— the first time anyone did.

He should have loved her. He thought about her often, engulfing himself into a state of constant and consuming desire. At times he felt he most certainly could have married her, which was why he almost had. Well, he had almost proposed. If not for his mother's interference he likely would have, but— Alice didn't know anything about that. Had she, they wouldn't have been doing this now that was for sure.

He had a ring even, bought and paid for, sitting currently in the top drawer of his dresser. Oh well.

He could admit to himself that he loved Juliet. Juliet, the unintentional purveyor of teenage fantasies. Juliet, his dead brother's wife. He imagined he'd find the same sexual fulfillment with Juliet, but without the resulting hollowness and isolation. It would be all cottony sweet love, expanding to fill all of the spots inside of him that were left empty and wanting— and what an awful way to think, with Alice dozing lightly on the mattress beside him. His buzz had worn off, disgust slouching in.

He'd gone and retrieved her from the warmth and relative security of her dorm room with great, unspoken promise. Fondled her in the park, ushered her to his hotel room, fucked her, and now, he lay next to her in a state of physical satisfaction thinking of how he loved a different woman instead. He had to get up. He had to get away.

"Preston?" He heard her voice from behind him as he stood at the window, looking out onto Front Street and to Union Station. "Oh, Preston," she sat up, the bedsheet falling carelessly around her waist as he turned to look at her. "It's so late. Matron said she’ll tan my hide if I miss curfew one more time this month."

At other times this kind of talk would have idly excited him— it was more the way she said it, tan my hide, her thrilling ability to turn almost any phrase into a double entendre. He'd think about her skin, naked, pink welts rising up across the pristine whiteness of her breasts and ass.

“My goodness," she said then, sitting up and smiling, shaking her hair down around her shoulders as the dim streetlights revealed him to be entirely naked. "Aren't you the little exhibitionist." She meant, of course, that he had been standing by the full length window. But even that couldn't do it for him now. He felt like he'd gone dead below the waist.

He said he'd do his part to save her skin by driving her back to the university right away. Tomorrow they'd eat dinner together at Old Mill, he said. He promised to pick her up at seven, assuming her hide was still intact after the matron got through with her.

*

Juliet, Juliet. The frail-bodied, soft-eyed, dinner table exhibitionist. Sexy little college girl. High Anglican baby. Now that he had attained temporarily satisfaction for his physical needs, he could torture himself with a clear mind over the emotional ones.

He was almost certain Juliet hadn't been a virgin when she married Scotty. He would have put money on it (and under what grotesque circumstance would a bet like that would be made, anyway?) But he did believe she was probably a virgin when she met him. Scotty had had tons of girlfriends. He screwed a nineteen-year-old maid at their rented home in East Hampton when he was fifteen, and when they got home a month later he'd used his newfound skill to lay their gardener's sixteen-year-old daughter. He'd had an early start and he didn't slow down, either. Not for some time. But Juliet's ethereal prettiness, her softness— she must have enchanted him the way she had Preston. She must have cast some sort of spell.

He imagined Scotty dating her. Taking her out. Asking to go exclusive. Proposing marriage and then ticking away the days and nights of their engagement. Somewhere in there, he likely got her into bed. And while he might have been around plenty in the past, he was never a cheater. He didn't two-time— he was devoted to her and once they had children, he was devoted to them, too. He was, at the time of his death, still a happily married man.

*

When he arrived home, his mother was still awake. It wasn't late. She was sitting in the front room, the one that the elevator door opened into.

"Well?" she said, by way of a greeting. "How did it go?"

"It went fine." He stopped to remove his watch, to take his money clip from his pocket, before working off his cufflinks, one after the other. All of these he placed on a small table, before going to the closet and hanging up his jacket.

They had staff, though far less in number now than when his father was still alive. The housekeeper, Miss Macallen, and the maid, who was a younger girl named Carla. The butler, who Preston always called Mr. Roberts, but who his mother called Georgie. She gave them Friday and Saturday evenings off, so long as she wasn't entertaining.

"Did he accept your offer?"

"Yes, mother," he said. He poured his own drink— the scotches he'd had with Ralph had long since worn off— and sat down opposite her, crossing his legs. "He accepted."

"Good," she said, beaming into the fire rather than at him. Still, she was clearly pleased. Business now out of the way, she began to talk to him about her day, and about what she had done. She had seen Juliet and the children.

"Little Catherine has a recital next Saturday at one o'clock," she said. Little Catherine— Scotty's oldest daughter would be turning nine next month. The younger one, Martha, was seven.

"Fine," he said, meaning that he would be there. So, he knew, would Juliet. He imagined her fussing softly over her daughter, fixing the bow at the back of her dress, the girl's hair braided and pinned into a coronet. Juliet's dress would undoubtedly be sewn from something soft, and dark— velvet, maybe— tailored conservatively but in a way that still showed everyone her figure, her breasts. He twitched, feeling his cheeks flush. She'd have to wear a tent to hide those things.

The children attended the same school as Alice had, the one all Toronto girls did, called Bishop Strachan. It was an Anglican school. Preston and Scott had both been sent to the male equivalent for their schooling, Upper Canada.

*

Poor Juliet had a spring cold. Her nose, though powdered, was slightly pink and her hands, her knuckles, were chapped and red. Otherwise she looked flawless, perfect as ever. More delicate than ever, with the way the cold had reduced her by a few pounds. God, how he longed to gather her in his arms and rock her gently.

He raised her hand to his mouth and did the unthinkable— in that crowded Bishop Strachan reception room, surrounded by mothers and grandmothers and the few fathers who'd begged a mid-day leave off work— he kissed it.

Not just once. He pressed his lips tenderly to one inflamed knuckle, and then the next, briefly caressing each one in turn.

"Preston," she said, issuing a mild, automatic objection— she was surprised, making no move to pull her hand back. "What are you doing?" His eyes met hers, his hand started to shake. Quickly, she put her other hand over it. "It's okay," she said. "It's all right." She smiled her frail, shy smile. "You surprised me, that's all."

He stood beside her, both her hands still enclosing his. He prayed for her not to let go.

How could he possibly marry her? How could he do what his mother wanted? She held his hand in the middle of that busy room like it was the most natural thing. He felt so inferior beside her. Undeserving. He felt like a boy of only six or seven years old.

*

It was three weeks later. He'd avoided seeing her since, taking Alice out one Sunday night against his mother's vehement protests— It was her birthday, he said. What was he supposed to do? Bring her over here instead?

No, his mother had said, shuddering. She never tried to hide her feelings toward Alice, or most things. No, no. Take her out. The following week he begged off coming to the table, saying he'd been in bed all day with a headache. Now he had to see her again. He was dressed and all ready for dinner when the elevator dinged.

His hand shaking wildly in the soft enclosure of her palms. His heart banging in his chest. The mother of two braided girls in matching dresses. How was he supposed to even look at her?

*

"It started then," he said. "It has never stopped." A pause. "Nothing causes it. It comes and goes."

"Do you want to go to bed with me, Preston?"

"What?" He looked up, suddenly. "What?"

"When you kissed my hand at Catherine's recital— after the recital— is that what you?— Do you?"

He continued to stare at her, his bottom jaw falling open slightly.

"No one has done anything like that to me in a long time," she said. She was almost wincing as she said it, her shoulders folding in as though she was trying to deflect away her own uncertainty, her eyes on the verge of spilling over tears. "No one's kissed me."

"Yes," he said, coming free of his sudden-onset apoplexy with a near shout. She startled. He lowered his voice. "Yes," he said again. "I do. And I did it because I'm in love with you, Juliet. I love you."

She was in his arms then, her hands grasping his upper arms and her face buried in his shirt. "You smell so good," she said, sobbing, taking in a deep, shaky breath. "Oh, my god."

Into the bedroom. He undressed her slowly, standing there still fully clothed himself as he looked at her in the dim light coming in the window beside them. She was exactly as he imagined.

"It's been so long since— since—" she said, her voice so soft he could barely hear it, her chest rising and falling with each breath. Nodding, he reached down and unbuttoned his pants. He saw he would have to undress himself.

They got into bed, with him lying down on top of her. It was noteworthy to him that it was them, because of their circumstances, because of how badly he had wanted it and how long he had waited for it to happen. Noteworthy. It was earth-shattering. It was monumental. It was nearly transcendent and— to him— it felt better than it had even for the first time, or any other time since.

*

“Preston, how long have you kept a room here?"

"Since I came back home," he said.

"Does your mother know?"

"No," he said, rolling on to his side and resting his face on one hand, elbow bent. "I keep it so that I can have privacy from her."

She was quiet for a moment.

"I don't mean to keep you private," he said then. "Although we're here now, I don't mean to keep you a secret. I love you, and I want to marry you. I've wanted to marry you for a long time."

"How long?"

“Years."

"Did you love me when Scott was still alive?"

"Yes."

"When he died?"

"Yes."

She sighed, and he knew what she was thinking.

"My mother should have never said anything to you about that." He was referencing it outright— the horrible thing Juliet had said to him at Scotty's funeral. "She had no right to bring it up so soon."

He wasn't present for the conversation between his mother and Juliet. But at the wake, when he'd gone to Juliet and hugged her, she pulled back and looked at him with eyes that were closed over and dull. "I suppose you've heard the news," she said, in a tone that would have been caustic if it wasn't so wounded and raw.

"No?"

"You and I are betrothed." she stubbed her cigarette directly onto the glass-topped table beside them. "Your mother said... she said..." she took a long drink from her glass and then swayed to one side dangerously. He put out a hand to steady her, but she took no notice. "She said, one brother will step in for the other. After, of course, an appropriate interval has passed." He let go of her, his hands starting to shake.

He tore a strip off his mother for that, but not for a month later. After all, she was freshly grieving, too. And Juliet never addressed it again, any of it— the closest she came was mentioning one time how horrifically medicated she was in the weeks after Scotty died. Doped to the gills was what she said, her voice trembling in hindsight, with regret.

As for his mother, she never mentioned it to Juliet again. He liked to think that was a result of his delayed— yet still vehement— intervention. However, she mentioned it to him, periodically, reminding him of what she called his duty. "She is already your financial obligation," she said. "You have a duty to her now, as family, to ensure that she does not suffer the ongoing social stigma of being a widow."

"Mother!"

"And to see that her children do not grow up fatherless."

"My nieces?"

"Your brother's children," she corrected him, her steely voice making clear the distinction.

"And what if—" he'd paused, jamming both hands deep into his pockets. "What if she doesn't want to marry me?"

"Preston!" Her withering exclamation only served to cut him down further in his confusion and defiance. "It isn't a matter of want. In a case like this— especially, like this— the proper thing to do is step up and care for the widow of one's brother. Juliet is a kind, well-mannered woman who any man would be pleased to call his wife—"

"She was Scotty's wife!" He hadn't meant to yell.

"Yes, and Scott is dead," his mother said. Unlike him, her coldness was entirely intentional. She couldn't bring up her true feelings on the subject without making overt reference to the way he'd died and, being herself, doing such a thing would surely lead to another death in the family: hers, out of shame. "A death in the family always proliferates obligation among the living," she'd said then. "And without any further argument, Preston, this obligation is yours."

What she meant was: for as long as Juliet remained a widow, people would ask, how did her husband die? And then the whole thing would have to be drudged up again. Here was a way of putting that all to rest. It was also a way of keeping Juliet and the children wholly in the family. She might meet another man, and fall in love, but that other man might move her away somewhere else. He might not provide well. He might beat her, neglect her, he might run around on her and humiliate her— and please don't forget, this was the mother of Scott's children they were discussing. The mother of her granddaughters. Of his nieces.

"And you have always been very fond of Juliet," she said.

She could tell him what to do. She could order him not to argue. But she couldn't make him pick up a ring and put it on anybody's finger, so he didn't. He continued to present himself as a bachelor, and continued to act like one. He sent Juliet a cheque every month, made out in his hand, not the accountant's. He went to parties, he went on dates, he took girls back to the Royal York and slept with them. He once spent three days and nights straight there with Alice Connor, leaving the bed only to piss and to put out a food order, collecting the full trays and then leaving them, empty, back in the hall. The entire time his mother didn't say boo about any of it, either. She just reiterated his obligation to Juliet. It wasn't until he stated his intention to marry Alice that she finally intervened.

He'd prepared for her to respond that way, and he had planned to bowl her over silent with an unprecedented display of temper. He was going to yell, and maybe even scream, and slam his fist down on the table and say it. Once and for all, he was going to tell her that he was a thirty-one year old man and it was his choice who he married, not hers. "Be a man?" he'd imagined yelling in her stunned into silence— for once!— face, throwing her own words back at her with added vitriol. "A man chooses who he marries, not his mother. I am being a man." He could add in that he'd fought in a war, for good measure. That he'd dropped out of an airplane in the pitch black at fifteen hundred feet, and he guessed any man who had done that could be afforded the courtesy of planning out his own life after.

He didn't want to marry Alice, though. So when it came down to it, he never asked. And after what happened at Scott's wake, he had a hard time seeing himself ever asking Juliet, either.

*

He came, shuddering in the silvery pre-dawn moonlight. "Juliet," he whispered. "I love you. Tell me you love me, too."

"I love you."

"And you'll marry me?"

"I will."

They lay together and talked. He told her everything. He told her how he'd seen down her shirt the first time they met.

"Oh," she said, a faint blush spreading over her cheeks— as though she weren't now lying completely naked beside him, showing him her entire body in the dim light. "I should have been more mindful," she said. He said that she vastly underestimated the imagination and tenacity of a teenage male's mind. He said she could have shown up dressed in a flour sack and he'd have found something provocative in it. As he spoke, he reached out and brushed the back of his hand lightly across her breasts.

"How many other men have you been with?" he asked her.

She blinked, looking at his hand.

"Just one?" he asked, and she nodded, yes. He thought again when they met, her youthful, delicate sensuality. Had his brother been gentle with her the first time? He had to have been. "Even after— in all that time— you never?"

"No," she said.

"Did you want to get married again?" She must have had interest from other men during that time. He was sure of it.

She sighed, not from his line of questioning but the movement of his hands, the way he was touching her. "I worried about the girls," she said. "Any man would have to first be a suitable father for them. One who wouldn't treat them like just another man's children."

"You must have been asked," he said.

"Yes."

"And you said no?"

She nodded.

"What was that?" He bent his head closer to her, his hand still on her breast.

"I said that when I was asked, I thought of you."

You. She didn't think of Scotty, her dead husband, the father of her children. She thought of him. He leaned in closer, attaching his mouth to one of her breasts. He took the other one in his head and rubbed it gently, caressing it. Her voice floated down over his head, lightly teasing and indulgent, the pads of her fingers pressed into the back of his neck. "Should I ask you the same thing?"

His response was muffled, and short, a sound that meant "no." He let his jaw fall open wider, taking more of her in, and she began to kneed his shoulders. When he finally pulled away from her and sat up, his face was flushed bright red, his hair tumbling over his forehead, sticking to his damp and sweaty skin. "It doesn't matter," he said, breathless, panting. "Nothing meant anything. I was never in love."

He allowed himself the briefest flash of memory— not one, but many, a comprehensive view of his sexual history. The things he'd done before, the tearing away of clothing, sucking, biting, begging to be hit in the face, coming on a woman's breasts, on her behind, holding tightly to a fistful of hair and yanking hard, pleading to have the same done for him.

Alice clobbered him so hard once that he came, shooting it all over her and the bed uncontrollably. The next morning he woke up with a swollen cheek and a bruised eye. A different girl, Marie Costello, had shied away in horror though when he'd made the same request of her. "Hurt you?" she'd exclaimed, drawing back on the bed away from him. "Why Preston! I couldn't!"

“It doesn't hurt," he'd said, panting and straining, desperate to resume the act they'd already gotten well into by then. "It does, but it feels good. Please, just hit me, baby. Hit me right here." He pointed to his cheek frantically. But Marie did something truly awful— not only did she refuse, but she got up off the bed and began to dress herself again, buttoning up her blouse and then picking up her stockings, unrolling them high on one leg and then the other.

"Preston," she said, her voice gentle but firm, withering with finality. "It isn't normal to ask someone to hit you in the face during lovemaking. It isn't normal to seek out sexual pleasure in physical pain." She leaned over to clip each stocking at the top of her thigh.

He'd forgotten until that moment that she was a psychology major. Second year. He watched as she hauled her skirt up around her waist, zipping it shut deftly and smoothing it over her hips, stepping into her shoes. Groaning, he fell back onto the pillow and covered his face in both hands, his erection still throbbing. "You need help, Preston," she'd said. Then she left. He heard the door close behind her.

Marie was a blond girl, the only daughter of some suburban bank branch manager, brought up undoubtedly as the prettiest, richest, most popular girl around. He was certain she would have arrived at the dorms with a brand new wardrobe— thick, pleated wool skirts in different colours, solids and plaid; cashmere sweaters, fluffy angora, a beautifully-tailored camel coat, cotton blouses, a gold circle pin. There were scores of girls like her in every freshman class, smart but not too smart, well-groomed and ambitious. Like Marie, many of them were willing to afford him the privilege of themselves— their willing bodies— thinking it gave them an advantage they wouldn't dare afford a lesser man, one of lesser means, with less money.

None of them had ever lectured him before. Nor had they been so heartbreakingly, so cuttingly cold as to go off and leave him in such a desperately turgid state.

Anyway. He wondered, as he prepared to make love to Juliet for the second time, what she might think of a request like that. Hit me. He didn't think he wanted her to hurt him— later, he could give this more thought. But in that moment the thrill of it, once so illicit and spine-tingling and dick-hardening, was diminished entirely. He didn't want to be punished for feeling pleasure right now. Not by her.

Their love was soft and dense. He remembered how she'd said it had been a long time— remembered how she'd sobbed— and so he remained solicitous of her in a way he had never been with any partner before. He stroked her hair back and kissed her forehead. He kissed her neck, and her shoulders, and he rubbed her back, trailing his fingers up and down her spine while he thrust himself into her, until he felt her shivering with pleasure. He sat up on the mattress and pulled her onto his lap, moving his hips very slowly while she scratched him lightly, nails drifting through the hair on his chest and over his nipples. "God," he whispered, and she grabbed the sides of his chest with both hands, pressing her own into it.

"Do you like it, Preston?" she asked, and all he could do in response was nod, yes. The love he felt for her made him feel bashful and inexperienced, virginal even. It felt like starting over.

Their roles reversed; it was her turn to be solicitous of him. She offered him her breasts, and when he took them, she ran her hands through his hair, catching handfuls along the way and tugging just enough to remind him of the immense capacity for pleasure that lay in such an act.

She lay him back down and began to kiss him lightly all over, his shoulders, his chest, his waist, his groin. She sat back up and lay alongside him, rubbing him to completion while he moaned and buckled and swore, taking her face in one hand and kissing her deeply. It flowed out of him rather than shot, over her hand and down onto his stomach, warm and sticky. Once he was done she let go of him, but continued to rub his lower stomach, the tops of his thighs. The whole time he just lay there whimpering, convulsing gently with a kind of pleasure, both surface and deep, that he'd never experienced before.

*

An Alden is getting married? When? Why it can't be Preston— oh, it is! Goodness. I thought he was a confirmed bachelor.

Confirmed, or condemned?

Stop, Louisa, that's terrible.

His mother did always want him married to the sister-in-law—

Scott's wife?

Yes, and that's who it is he's marrying.

Wait—?

Yes.

Preston Alden is marrying Juliet? Alden? His brother's widow?

That's how it's always done in these old families, darling.

But after all this time?

Can you blame him for waiting so long? If you ask me, the real tragedy is how the young man was ordered to give up any life his own once his brother gave up on his.

*

It's been years.

Years. That's how long Beatrice has been gunning for it.

Darling don't say that. Don't say gunning. Not after what happened with Scott.

*

I heard she was the one to find him.

Beatrice?

No, not Beatrice, the wife. Julianne.