The Good Kind of Bad (16 page)

It also bore an uncanny resemblance to an episode of
Law and Order
Joe had been watching after he’d tired of the game repeats. Come to think of it, he did have the whole series stashed away beside the porn.

I’d been so stupid.

Nina left after an uncomfortable quarter of an hour. Now Victor had vacated their apartment, Mickey was pleading for her return. She refused to leave me in such a state, but after twenty missed calls and a police escort waiting across the street, Nina couldn’t say
no
to him, not if she wanted those Prada peep-toes anyway. I, on the other hand, could only muster a whimper of a goodbye.

I was struggling to remember Joe’s face. The man I fell in lust with had already drifted away, and I wasn’t sure he was ever coming back. Joe’s dubious version of the truth was legendary, but lying about the fate of his father? Did the man have no shame? No conscience? I knew what’d be waiting for me back home, yet more lies to excuse a deception all too bewildering, though I wasn’t sure that
was
home anymore – Joe no longer the man he, and I, pretended he was.

Outside, the storm still raged. As the rain lashed down behind the glass, I focused on the puddles and streams on the asphalt, of the new coastline emerging on the street, so I didn’t think of evil lies and poisoned words . . . and so I wouldn’t have to ponder the truth.

Out in the night, I searched my bag for my umbrella while becoming ever drenched by the early summer rain. Running to the doorway of Teri’s Dry Cleaners next door, I shook myself off and patted down my hair. I was going to have to wait it out.

In the doorway of the Corner Bakery across the street I watched a couple embrace, also praying for the downpour to pass. They laughed as the storm tried to lift them off their feet, and I threw them an envious stare as they shared a kiss.

Then I looked closer. The girl was long-legged, in a black playsuit with tousled locks the colour of fire and stuck to the guy like he was made of treacle. The man, around six foot with a mop of dark hair and worn-leather jacket looked almost familiar, though through the blinding rain it was hard to catch a clear view of his face. Then the eyes that’d lied to me a thousand times smiled down at her.

It was
my
husband. It was Joe.

‘Well, Rhonda, Just Once Hair Lacquer makes me feel twenty-five again, and I’m fifty-two!’

Nick from Tahoe let the Shopping Network audience graciously applaud his hairpiece. It wasn’t a bad wig, trumping the previous advert for spray-on hair. Did only balding men watch late-night infomercials?

I’d had a sodden and sobering walk home from Bemo’s, leaving Joe outside the bakery with his redheaded slut. He hadn’t seen me, too busy to notice anything but her, though only thirty minutes after I’d arrived home, my dirty, cheating, amoeba of a husband had stumbled in reeking of drink.

There was an upside, of sorts. At least he hadn’t gone home with the bitch.

We’d now resorted to a lack of conversation and infomercials at high volume in the dusky lounge. Maybe he
had
seen me, that after the vodka and slap and lies and infidelity, he knew time had been called on the brief story of us ‒ either that or he didn’t care.

I was too angry to be upset. My life had broken up on the shore, rotted and ruined into something unsalvageable. Though this time, it wasn’t something I wanted to repair.

Our story was fiction, a forgotten book on the seat of a train or torn pages on a spring breeze. It’d been a fakery, a Jekyll; constructed reality of the highest calibre. I’d been dying to show everyone how dangerous and cool and exciting Joe was, but more how I’d trained him like a monkey to be obedient, house proud and goddamn faithful. He was different from the others, he was mine, and after tiring of the rebellion Project Joe would be on hand to transform him from lazy drunk into well-groomed underwear model.

Sure, I’d cared about Joe, lusted after him, let the butterflies dance in my stomach, but it didn’t amount to love. I’d been so busy having a
good
time, I hadn’t stopped to think about what the hell I was doing, about what came after, i.e., the rest of our lives. Maybe that’s how I’d wanted it. Maybe it suited me that way.

Now it’d become an amorphous mask, the face he looked out from behind. The television screen warped the rocky contours, the cutting features, the odd shapes and half-shadows while his sunglasses remained, a taut grey T-shirt advertising the brawn.

The guilt radiated from him like a bad smell. First had come the lies, then the casual alcoholism, but all prior betrayal was surpassed by the clandestine affair he’d expectantly deny.

Joe picked up the remote and began flicking through the channels. He continued the remote jabbing on autopilot, the snippets of trash TV blurring into one like a zoetrope. Once bored of the channel-hopping, he bounced the zapper onto the coffee table, already wrapped in tape from last spewing its batteries.

Bull in a china shop was no stretch of the imagination for Joe. Doors kicked rather than pushed, mugs slammed instead of placed; he fed a dash of violence into each daily action. Even feeding Sybil was a chance to expel his anger on the Joe-tamper-proof food packets. In the little things I saw it: what was beneath, who and what this man, the other half of me, was.

What had it been, almost two months? Sixty days since I’d last seen Will and checked my senses in at the door? Now I’d been left, saddled, festooned with this brute. He was a man who thought nothing of slapping me, thought nothing of lying, the words kicking me like I was some kind of dog. I finally had to admit I was wrong: to the world, and to myself.

I opened my mouth but only a whimper was expelled. Of all the expletives ready to burst from me, of all the screams, nothing emerged. It was like I’d sunk below the waterline, thrashing against my breath as my lungs drank too much.

‘I was watching that,’ I murmured.

He glanced over from his TV chair with a look of disdain. ‘You want to know about hair loss?’ Joe snapped, settling on a repeat of
Friends
.

When I did manage the right words, they weren’t half as hard to say as I’d imagined. ‘I know about your little slut. I saw you.’

Nothing came in reply, apart from the canned laughter for Chandler et al. With a strained expression, he appeared to be thinking.

In place of his own absent reply, I mimicked, ‘“Damn, baby, why didn’t you say? You mean the bitch I was making out with while my wife stood across the street?”.’

‘Oh. You mean her,’ he threw back.

‘Yeah, her! That’s all you’ve got to say?’

He just sat, scratching his head like an ape. ‘What else do you want me to say? Cat’s out of the bag now. All right, you saw us. Slap the cuffs on me already. Big deal, baby.’

‘I’ll give you a big deal. George Bemo told me about your dad. He’s not playing chess with death. He’s playing it in a Skokie nursing home!’

His stare lacked any humanity, his stance one loaded with venom and his body a hollow shell with a soul presently vacant. There was a scintilla of viciousness in his eyes, a genuine darkness. This, from the man I
chose
to marry.

He rubbed a palm to his cheek. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘What do I want from you? Where’s my husband for starters?’

‘Oh, you mean
Joe
? We got hitched a month ago. A month! And that don’t equal a whole gallon of time. I’ve had pisses longer than this so-called marriage.’ Climbing out of the chair, Joe began pacing towards me on the sofa, his arms wide and hands balled into fists. ‘How did you think it was going to be? Shopping sprees and evening walks on Navy Pier? You don’t know me at all. Damn, if you did? You never would’ve married me.’

Then he grabbed my arms, pulling me up to standing until we were toe to toe, his gargantuan figure half a foot over my slender frame. His arms held a new threat, an unhidden violence. I knew I was no match for him, if it came to that.

I didn’t show him, but every word crushed me a little more inside.

‘Open your goddamn eyes, girl. You want the truth? Your bitching bullshit drives me insane. Every word is about that damn office you work in and then you’re on my back, whining in my ear. Don’t be surprised I had to go someplace else. Oh yeah, and my dad’s in a wheelchair instead of a grave and I didn’t tell you, again with the big deal. I didn’t ask for this, didn’t ask for you. This wasn’t part of the plan. I thought you’d do my laundry, cook my meals and keep the 
frigo
 stocked up with beer, but no, I get this high-maintenance bitch from hell psychoanalysing the way I brush my teeth. Don’t you get it? Aren’t you listening to me? Someone to do the chores ‒ it’s the one and only reason I married you.’

This was the man I was supposed to grow old with, the guy who’d tell witty anecdotes at family gatherings, like:
Remember when I told you my dad was dead and I had a fake brother
?
That was a fun time.

This was the real Joe, the one I’d glimpsed but ignored. Pretend Joe took me to restaurants and paid. He showered me with compliments in the sun-drenched park. He’d never have the audacity to check out other women and
especially
in my company, never mind grope them outside bakeries.

I loved Pretend Joe, a Joe that never existed. The real version, however? Anything but.

‘You didn’t
ask
for me? Didn’t you
ask
me to marry you?’ I spat, looking up into his grimacing face.

Then I saw something, from the corner of my eye, hurling towards me at great force. It was only then I realised it was his hand, becoming a fist, connecting with my face before the pain rippled out from the epicentre of my lip, over my cheek and across my jaw.

I felt the blood dribbling down my chin, down my neck, while Joe paced above me. I was on my knees, hands held out as if in prayer to shield me from the next blow, the next hit. I thought about fighting back, but from above he only smiled, like he knew what I was thinking.

As he backed away, I watched him swagger around the room, this time drunk, and this time it wasn’t lust I felt or glee or delirious rapture.

‘You need to learn when to shut that mouth.’ Looking across at me, his eyes shone with disgust before he stormed back over and reached out his hand – not to stroke or caress my hair, but to snatch a clump of it instead.

Joe shot Anton in the arm, and only because he missed the bulls eye. He’d raised a gun to him, not only a hand to me. What did I think was going to happen? That we’d spar off with words for the rest of the night? Call it a day once I’d used every adjective under the sun to put him in his place? Joe wasn’t about the pacifism. Even the television remote knew that. I thought I’d had it: the power to beat him down because he
deserved
it, and because it was right.

Now I only had one thing left. My new best friend: indomitable fear. I was just a girl. Five foot seven, eight and a half stone, and for all my pre-wedding gym pilgrimages back in London, I had paltry muscles at best.

We remained in the dimly lit lounge, tussling in the glow of
Friends
as I let out a cry. I caught only a hint of an arm, a snatch of hair, a shard of tooth until, forcing back my head, Joe’s fingers enclosed the skin of my neck, like crab pincers severing the oxygen. I shook in terror as we stood locked in the alien embrace for what felt like hours, Joe smirking as his head rolled, considering me; choosing how to even up the canvas with the next spoiling blow.

His free hand encircled my wrist before he muttered some odious insult. Then came the second punch to my mouth, bone on bone as I felt something
crunch
.

Even before reaching out to break my fall, I knew it was done. Me, him, Joe, us . . . no sob stories of dead brothers and seedy police cover-ups would fix this. My smarting jaw was arrests and charges, holding cells and jail time.

My body screamed at me to run, to scramble and flee the danger. I had to call the police, and while I still could.

‘Hey, where you going?’ Joe spat down to me as I scrambled over the floorboards.

Side-lining the pain in my jaw was becoming almost impossible.

Still on the floor with my face aching like I’d been smacked in the mouth with a cricket bat, I reached up and snatched my jacket off the edge of the dresser, my phone inside the pocket. Feeding my arms through the holes as Joe still towered above me, it was only when I saw the trail of blood mark the leather that I realised how much I was bleeding. Wiping my face with the back of my hand, it was smeared with a fresh coat of claret while above me Joe limbered up for round two as I sat dazed on the floor. I could never hope to match Joe’s strength, but a verbal assault on his appersonation? I had all the ammunition I’d ever need.

‘You know, you swagger around here like you’re some kind of
god
.’ I winced, not only at the thought of the next wave of pain, but at the physical ache of forming the words around my battered jaw and bitten tongue.