Tied Up

He says, I’ll show you Riccione, you’ve never been, and now she’s on this train racing toward a place she’s never cared to see—especially out of season—unless you’re someone who comes from real cold. But he really wanted this. He even bought her the ticket and said it was a nice idea to meet halfway—him coming from the north, her from the south.

Tired and confused, with no real desire to see him, she already sensed the truth: this thing had been ending since the day it began—on her birthday—when he bought her a heavy gold bracelet and took offense because she didn’t want it. She hadn’t even liked it—too modern, too generic—yet he’d still had his name and date of birth engraved on it, even though they’d met only a few days earlier. If you don’t want it, I’ll throw it in the trash right here, he said. Part of her was drawn to his persistence. She took it, and that was the first in a disastrous series of terrible mistakes.

What she really wanted was to get back to school and finish the year—even if it meant alternating weeks of buying art supplies and food. Little food. Chicken scraps, oil, lemons. Whenever her roommate opened a pack of pasta, she’d quietly steal about twenty spaghetti strands and stash them away until they made a meal.

The half-empty station greets her arrival. It’s daytime, but the light is slanted, the air cold. At the far end of the platform she spots him—floral shirt, baggy shorts, flip-flops, long pale legs—blond and white like a German. She tells him you don’t walk around town in a swimsuit in March; he doesn’t take it well. Back then, she’d been charmed by how mature and responsible he seemed for his age, how good he was at his work—so much so that she hadn’t noticed how self-absorbed, ignorant, unempathetic, dull, and psychologically violent he really was.

She still doesn’t see it as they drive straight to a bland, forgettable hotel. Just enough time to change, and then he takes her to the kind of beach she hates—long, flat, endless. All the same. A deserted line of closed umbrellas under a pale, strained sun.

Since childhood, she’s lived in fog, always cold. Trying to cover her shoulders, she flounders in a rational panic, hoping to find some island some roots to belong to. There’s no time to figure out who she is or what she wants; basic needs come first—food, shelter, warmth. A small TV would be a blessing, because the ground-floor room where she lives turns into a pit of dread at night.

But he has this wonderful hotel in one of the most beautiful places in the world. He’s skilled at everything he does, certain he’ll be far richer than he already is, and soon. And he will. But he won’t restore the old, beautiful, traditional hotel he’s bought—he’ll turn it into a massive fairy-tale castle on the border between luxury and vulgarity. The frescoed stube, the 19th-century wooden staircase—everything will be burned or tossed, the way his borderland people discard the past.

The promise of a stable, secure life blinded her, and she kept crashing into it like a moth to a lamp. Then he asked her to work for free—from dawn to late night—in the bar, the restaurant, cleaning rooms. Because, he said, he wanted her to be and feel like family. He wanted to marry her right away, was pushy about it, but she laughed it off, thinking he was joking—it was too soon. His parents saw her like blood in the water; they even barged into her little room and threw all her belongings down the stairs.

Back in their room that night, her head is pounding so badly she can’t process what’s happening. She locks herself in the bathroom, but he knocks, comes in, makes his move. She tells him she’s not feeling well, but he mumbles something that means: I brought you here, and now we do what I’ve decided we’re doing. He drags her to the bed.

She says, Please, no, I don’t feel well—tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll talk about it. But he has that blank stare that means it’s too late, and her head hurts so much she thinks enduring the rape might be better than making him angry. She just hopes it’ll be over quickly. But it’s not. She can only see that fogged-over look—that look that’s not looking at her. And in that moment she leaves. She’s not there anymore. And what’s happening isn’t something ending—it’s something beginning, because he wants it to begin. But she doesn’t understand that. She’s so confused, such a sweet summer child.

Two months later, she’s battling relentless nausea and knows only one thing—she doesn’t want a child with him. She doesn’t understand that this “angel” was just step one of a plan, and she won’t realize it for a long time. She calls him and says she won’t let this baby be born—even if it’s tearing her apart, even if at the clinic they tell her it already has a heartbeat.

Even if her mother says she could keep it, that it would be beautiful. But in her instinctive, Pisces-sun-and-moon wisdom, she lets her do what the faint flicker of instinct is screaming at her to do. She can’t be there for her emotionally—it’s already a lot that she accompanies her to a place that unsettles her for her own reasons, a place she feels is beneath the life she envisions.

A couple of days later, he calls: Why don’t you come up and help? She explains they told her not to do any heavy lifting for a couple of weeks. He says, My mother lost eight and never stopped working.

And that’s it. She stays with him for another year.