The Final Confession of Mabel Stark: A Novel (An Evergreen book) Read Online Free Page B

isn't hard to mistake gratitude
for affection. It was just I was starting to mistrust his motives a little.
    One night he suggested that different ways of coupling might
make baby-making easier for us. "Do not have worry," he said. "I read
in a book."
    What followed was him suggesting I climb on top, a proposition
akin to my trying to engulf a bedpost. Not wanting to disappoint, I
agreed to give it a whirl. This turned out to be a mistake, as it gave
Dimitri a green light to suggest other means of copulation, some of
them more befitting barnyard animals than human beings. Over the
next few weeks I watched those damn tin soldiers march not only across
the ceiling but across the headboard, the wall opposite the foot of the
bed, the pillow supporting my chin and, one night, when I somehow
ended more out of bed than in, the chipped pine floorboards. What
made it worse was Georgina had stopped coming, and though I'd always
found her sugariness annoying I missed her fiercely nonetheless. Alone,
I did a lot of sniffling and wondering how on earth everything was
going to work itself out.
    My answer came one day in the new year. We'd just moved to the
bedroom, and I was about to unstopper a little brown bottle when
Dimitri put a hand on my forearm and said, "Wait, I have other idea to
make things easier."
    With this, he took the bottle from my hands and went over to the
bureau. He stooped and opened the drawer reserved for socks and handkerchiefs. He then pulled out a large packet, which surprised me
for as late as that morning his sock-and-handkerchief drawer had contained nothing but socks and handkerchiefs (my having put them there,
folded and de-lintified, myself). He sat beside me and unwound the
string wrapping the packet. "This will help," he kept muttering, "I am
sure," though he had difficulty unsealing the paper as his hands had
gone shaky and unto-operative. Finally, he pulled out what looked like
a breadboard-sized photograph, though I couldn't tell for sure seeing as
he kept the face of it angled away from me.

    Silence passed between us. Dimitri was reconsidering, I could
tell, and he might've put the thing away had I not been so infernally
curious. "Show me," I said, tugging his arm. "Give me a look." Finally
he took a deep breath and rotated the sepia so I could see what'd been
photographed. Which was: a woman, perhaps beautiful, perhaps not,
wearing French stockings and a string of pearls, bare backed, kneeling
before a nude man.
    I couldn't move, couldn't say a thing, forgot to breathe, even; I
could only look at that browny-bronze image and wonder what on
earth possessed that woman to do what she was doing. Extreme thirst,
was the only thing came to mind. In fact, I was so stunned it took a few
seconds for it to sink in why Dimitri might've been showing it to me.
Now this was a terrible moment, for all along I'd thought I'd been putting up with his nightly rutting so we could have a baby. And while I
couldn't so much as summon a name for what that woman was doing,
I knew for damn sure a baby wasn't going to come of it.
    I suppose it was hurt and frustration that came geysering up, for
the next thing I knew I was hitting him and slapping him and calling
him a horny old goat born in hell, Dimitri having to throw me on my
back and pin my hands over my head to defend himself. He was trying
to calm me by apologizing and saying he loved me and promising to get
rid of the photograph forthwith and heretofore. Had someone been listening in the next apartment (which someone probably was, the walls being thin as onion peels) they would've heard words like "Oh my precious petal" being yelled over words like "Let go my hands, you sweaty
Greek son of a bitch!" Finally, he had no choice but to leap off the bed
and race across the room to grab the Chinaman bottle. By the time he
got back, the fight had pretty much gone out of me, and he didn't so
much have to force the oozing brown